Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy

roman holidays

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Harriet Hosmer at work on clay model of Thomas Hart Benton, ca. 1862. Photograph courtesy Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Edited by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person

roman holidays

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american writers and artists in nineteenth-century italy

University of Iowa Press

Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright 䉷 2002 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Text design by Ellen McKie http://www.uiowa.edu/⬃uipress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. ‘‘Hawthorne’s Ghost in James’s Italy’’ by John Carlos Rowe was originally published in the Henry James Review 20 (Spring 1999): 107–34. The publication of this book was generously supported by the University of Iowa Foundation. Printed on acid-free paper library of congress cataloging-in-publication data Roman holidays: American writers and artists in nineteenthcentury Italy / edited by Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-87745-782-4 1. American literature—Italian influences. 2.Travelers’ writings, American—History and criticism. 3. American prose literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Americans—Travel—Italy—Rome—History—19th century. 5. Americans—Travel—Italy—History—19th century. 6. Authors, American—19th century—Biography. 7. Artists—United States—Biography. 8. Italy—Description and travel. 9. Rome (Italy)—In literature. 10. Rome (Italy)—In art. 11. Italy—In literature. 12. Italy—In art. I. Martin, Robert K., 1941–. II. Person, Leland S. ps159.i8 r66 2002 810.9⬘003— dc21 02 03 04 05 06 c 5 4 3 2 1

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robert k. martin and leland s. person Introduction

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richard h. millington 9 Where Is Hawthorne’s Rome? The Marble Faun and the Cultural Space of Middle-Class Leisure robert k. martin 28 ‘‘An Awful Freedom’’: Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Carnival kristie hamilton 41 Fauns and Mohicans: Narratives of Extinction and Hawthorne’s Aesthetic of Modernity nancy proctor 60 The Purloined Studio: The Woman Sculptor as Phallic Ghost in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun john carlos rowe 73 Hawthorne’s Ghost in James’s Italy: Sculptural Form, Romantic Narrative, and the Function of Sexuality in The Marble Faun, ‘‘Adina,’’ and William Wetmore Story and His Friends leland s. person 107 Falling into Heterosexuality: Sculpting Male Bodies in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson

priscilla l. walton 140 Roman Springs and Roman Fevers: James, Gender, and Transnational Dis-ease adam parkes 159 Henry James’s Italian Hours and the ‘‘Ruskinian Contagion’’ brigitte bailey 175 Fuller, Hawthorne, and Imagining Urban Spaces in Rome

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susan m. griffin 191 The Black Robe of Romance: Hawthorne’s Shadow and Howells’s Italian Priest robert milder 206 ‘‘The Connecting Link of Centuries’’: Melville, Rome, and the Mediterranean, 1856–1857 robert s. levine 226 Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome Contributors Index

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roman holidays

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Robert K. Martin and Leland S. Person

introduction Everybody, now-a-days, has been in Rome. nathaniel hawthorne, The Marble Faun

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For northern Europeans and Anglo-Saxons in general, nineteenthcentury Italy had a special resonance. The paradigm for the northern desire of Italy is of course Goethe’s Italienische Reise, with its yearning for change and emotional transformation. The English tradition of Italy was established by the Gothic novel, but the American nineteenth century increasingly moved away from that world toward a more reflective, realistic mode that was as much a contemplation of American society, as it came of age, as of Italian culture. The increase in American travel to Italy was partly a product of improved conditions of travel, but Italy offered as well an opportunity for Americans to evaluate their own experience of national identity. For the numerous American writers and artists who traveled to Italy in the nineteenth century, Italy represented possibilities not available at home. As we suggest in our title, Roman Holidays, which we take from the charming 1953 film by William Wyler, Italy offers a place of holiday— exemption from the familiar and the possibility of ‘‘other’’ kinds of experience. As Paul Baker puts it, travelers to Italy could ‘‘throw off the restraints and responsibilities of life at home,’’ a theme that would continue into the twentieth century in texts such as Elizabeth Spencer’s The Light in the Piazza and, of course, Roman Holiday itself.1 In the film Audrey Hepburn escapes from her guardians to enjoy a whirlwind tour of Rome, especially the lower-class areas her princessly status prevents her from seeing. In a climactic scene staged on a loosely tethered barge in the Tiber, Hepburn dances wildly with Gregory Peck and other marginal characters—so wildly that the

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scene devolves into chaotic violence, the police are called, and the two lovers must flee. This twentieth-century example of American Roman holidays has its roots in the nineteenth century. The extent of such interactions between Americans and Italy was enormous. Nathalia Wright states that ‘‘no other foreign country has figured so provocatively in American fiction.’’ In Wright’s view, Italy offered not only itself but also the world, with which it ‘‘opened intercourse.’’ 2 In his study of Henry James and Italy Carl Maves speaks of a ‘‘moral holiday,’’ nowhere perhaps more evident than in Tennessee Williams’s The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. The voluptuousness of which Maves speaks is countered by a sense of dissolution and decay, which Maves wittily calls ‘‘post-coital.’’ 3 The American is often unable to embrace Roman sensuousness without guilt. In a more recent study, Leonardo Buonomo sees Italy as ‘‘a readily accessible and not too disquieting Orient,’’ a tradition that is echoed by many gay writers, such as E. M. Forster, whose Italian novels sketch the more disturbing and challenging ‘‘Orient’’ that is ultimately found in Alexandria and India.4 The relationship between America and Italy in nineteenth-century accounts is one of cultural interpretation or reading. Although the writers of the nineteenth century moved away from the kind of Gothicism that is still present in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, that text nonetheless served as a guidebook for travelers, who went to see the sites of the novel, and illustrated editions provided reproductions of paintings and sculptures. Rome offered a new and more complex sense of history, one that was deeply layered and palimpsestic, not subject to easy rational analysis. For the American who had considered himself or herself as exempt from the childishness of Italy—that is, the lack of intellectual and moral maturity—the journey to Rome forced a reexamination of oneself and one’s identity. Rome allowed for freedom and was indeed in the mid-nineteenth century a site of political contestation, especially as seen in the work of Margaret Fuller, but that freedom could be terrifying in its challenge of assumptions of secure identity. Religious, political, and sexual assumptions were challenged for those writers who explored the Italy of another reality. The Italy they saw (for they rarely read Italian) was finally a part of their own moral landscape. In view of the longstanding tradition of American ‘‘holidays’’ in Rome, this collection of new essays seems especially appropriate. Collected from a 1998 summer conference in Rome on the topic ‘‘Nineteenth-Century Americans in Rome: Cultural Encounters,’’ these revisionist essays open up new ways of investigating the tradition of American travel to Rome, especially as they address questions of gender, class, and race. Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun has such a prominent

place in this collection for many reasons, one of them being its pretextual presence for so many of the American writers and artists who visited Rome after 1860. As Henry James would comment in his study of Hawthorne, The Marble Faun forms ‘‘part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome, and is read by every Englishspeaking traveller who arrives there, who has been there, or who expects to go.’’ 5 And as many of these essays demonstrate, Hawthorne’s novel remains part of the Roman visitor’s ‘‘intellectual equipment.’’ Richard Millington, ‘‘Where Is Hawthorne’s Rome? The Marble Faun and the Cultural Space of Middle-Class Leisure,’’ marks an appropriate starting point for this collection because he reminds us that although keenly interested in Italian art and culture, middle-class Americans regarded European tours first and foremost as vacations, or holidays. Because so many later American travelers used The Marble Faun as a guidebook, it makes sense to interrogate that novel, as Millington does, for its representation of an emerging concept of leisure. Millington goes further, however, by showing how Hawthorne’s writing career was bound up in the creation of leisured space—how deeply committed an ‘‘espouser’’ (in ‘‘The Old Manse,’’ for example) he was of the ‘‘values and possibilities of the leisure realm.’’ Then, Millington shows how The Marble Faun explores the ‘‘deeper’’ (moral and intellectual) uses of travel—for example, in Donatello’s transformation through the ‘‘curative process’’ of leisure—and, finally, how the novel records the ‘‘exhaustion of the very leisure aesthetic it celebrates.’’ Italy and Rome offered American writers opportunities to explore more specific alternatives—otherness in various forms. Being on holiday in Europe, much like going into the ‘‘wilderness’’ for earlier generations of American explorers and travelers, offered both opportunities and danger— opportunities to try being and acting like ‘‘others,’’ danger that the values and even the very foundations of American selfhood might be destabilized and placed at risk. In the process of investigating the ‘‘slippery sense of selfhood’’ in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, Robert Martin examines some of the ways that Roman holidays brought American identity into question, and he uses the concept of ‘‘carnival’’ to characterize the many-sided anxieties about identity that Hawthorne’s Roman experience provoked. He focuses first on gender and on Hawthorne’s ‘‘terror at the potential loss of gendered identity’’ and his ‘‘ambivalent response to sexual ambiguity.’’ Finally, he examines racial and even species ambiguities in Hawthorne’s representation of Miriam and Donatello. Encounters with the ancient civilization of Rome raised significant questions for Americans in light of their own country’s civil turmoil and

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emerging nationhood; it was a kind of magic mirror that could reflect and refocus attention back on American issues. Kristie Hamilton, in ‘‘Fauns and Mohicans: Narratives of Extinction and Hawthorne’s Aesthetic of Modernity,’’ places The Marble Faun within a tradition of other ‘‘narratives of extinction,’’ especially James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, in order to show Hawthorne’s engagement with the question of American modernity. Placing Donatello within the typology of vanishing American ‘‘Indians’’ (epitomized in Cooper’s Uncas), Hamilton makes a compelling case for The Marble Faun as an American ‘‘Indian story’’ of racial extinction. She goes on, however, to explore the cultural significance of each novel’s ‘‘Anglo-American, heterosexual twosomes’’ (Duncan Heyward and Alice Munro, Kenyon and Hilda), whom she terms the ‘‘receivers and the carriers of each novel’s wish toward the future.’’ Hamilton thus views the impending marriage between Hilda and Kenyon more positively than most critics have done, particularly when she concludes that they learn a new, modern aesthetic through their Roman experiences. Nancy Proctor’s ‘‘The Purloined Studio’’ offers an appropriate transition between those essays devoted solely to Hawthorne and The Marble Faun and those essays that deal with other writers because from her Lacanian point of view she explicitly raises questions that later writers faced as they marked out their relationship to Hawthorne and his guidebook novel. In shifting attention from writers to sculptors—American women sculptors (Edmonia Lewis, Louisa Lander, and especially Harriet Hosmer) who were active in Rome during the time that many of the writers treated in this collection visited the Eternal City—Proctor circles back to Hawthorne and The Marble Faun. Proctor ingeniously argues that Hawthorne’s disingenuous remarks about not stealing a sculpture (Zenobia) ‘‘from a lady’’ (Harriet Hosmer) mask a theft that he covers by admitting to borrowing William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra. ‘‘The representation of Hosmer’s Zenobia,’’ Proctor concludes, ‘‘is materially continuous with the text in which the Cleopatra is portrayed’’—the ‘‘studio’s purloined letter,’’ or ‘‘central absence,’’ the novel’s ‘‘impossible figure,’’ ‘‘Woman sculptor,’’ the woman who has the phallus. If Italy serves nineteenth-century artists as a kind of laboratory site for encountering Others, it must be said that otherness takes several different forms. While gender and sexuality offer two of the most important terms for such encounters, these categories of difference are often cut with concerns about race and class. Several essays in this collection focus on the anxieties toward gender and sexuality that Roman holidays provoked. In analyzing Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and

James’s William Wetmore Story and His Friends and ‘‘Adina,’’ John Carlos Rowe draws connections between Hawthorne’s encounter with Roman sculpture in the late 1850s and Henry James’s encounter with the same art and with many of the same sculptors a decade or so later. For both male writers, Rowe demonstrates, a ‘‘diverse group of women writers, artists, and sculptors’’ (especially Harriet Hosmer) provoked anxieties regarding ‘‘feminine personal independence and self-assertiveness, political challenges to patriarchy, and growing public acclaim for women’s artistic and intellectual achievements.’’ Both male writers, however, defend ‘‘masculine authority, both sexual and literary, against imagined feminist challenges’’ in order to ‘‘negotiate the homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual desires available in the changing sexual politics of nineteenth-century America.’’ Leland S. Person covers some of the same ground in his essay on sculpting male bodies in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson, although he focuses primarily on Hawthorne’s and James’s efforts to express anxieties associated with men viewing sculptures of other men’s naked bodies. Person is less interested in Hawthorne’s influence on James than on the relation of the two writers to nineteenth-century discourses of masculinity, embodiment, and desire— on the ‘‘subject-object relation, through the medium of sculpture, between men and other men’s bodies.’’ In particular, he asks what language was available to Hawthorne and James for mediating or constructing responses to male nakedness. Person discusses James’s condescending attitude toward Hawthorne’s anxieties about sculpted nudity, for example, but then shows, somewhat surprisingly, that Hawthorne engages the issues raised by male-male gazing more forthrightly in The Marble Faun than James does in Roderick Hudson. Like Robert Martin and Kristie Hamilton in their essays on Hawthorne, Priscilla Walton examines the intersection of gender and race in Henry James’s Italian narratives: Italian Hours, Roderick Hudson, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl. Focusing on what she calls James’s narrativization of ‘‘dis-ease,’’ Walton argues that Rome provides a ‘‘contradictory site’’ for James, in large part because of Italy’s ‘‘instability’’ as a ‘‘white’’ country. Relying on recent theories of whiteness and colonialism, Walton notes that nonwhite people were often associated with dirt, disease, and death, so that encounters between ‘‘white’’ Americans such as Daisy Miller and Roderick Hudson and ‘‘dusky’’ foreigners such as Giovanelli and Christina Light threaten to contaminate and thus destabilize racial purity. Whereas the scholars whose essays we have summarized thus far emphasize American encounters with Italy that destabilize categories of

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gender and race, Adam Parkes’s essay on James and John Ruskin reminds us that American encounters initially took an aesthetic form. Collected and published in 1909, Parkes argues, James’s Italian Hours reflects his attempt to rewrite the version of Italy he had encountered in Ruskin’s works. Ruskin offered James and other writers a ‘‘crucial intertext’’ and became for James especially a ‘‘dominant precursor’’ whose writing prevented ‘‘direct access’’ to Italy and whose influence he found it difficult to escape. James caricatures Ruskin in some of his Italian essays, undermining Ruskin’s ‘‘claim to the role of Victorian sage and to the affirmation of masculine identity.’’ James tried to forge a rhetoric of ‘‘literary freedom’’ as the ‘‘basis of his own aesthetic practices,’’ and to do so he repudiated what he called the ‘‘contagion’’ of Ruskin’s ‘‘excessive’’ tendencies to legislate aesthetic response. Indeed, Parkes argues, James repeatedly places Ruskin on trial in Italian Hours, effectively replaying the actual legal trial of 1878 in which James McNeill Whistler sued Ruskin for libeling his painting. Although Hawthorne and James are perhaps the best-known nineteenth-century American literary visitors to Rome and to Italy, they were by no means alone, and in the final section of Roman Holidays we include four essays that examine other writers. In ‘‘Fuller, Hawthorne, and Imagining Urban Spaces in Rome,’’ Brigitte Bailey uses Benedict Anderson’s theory about the cultural construction of nationhood and John Urry’s theory of the ‘‘tourist gaze’’ to compare Margaret Fuller’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s responses to Rome. Both writers participated in an ‘‘urban imaginary,’’ Bailey argues, whose ‘‘bourgeois, gendered discourse’’ both described and produced the city (Rome). Examining what she calls the ‘‘mutually constituting elements of gender, city, and nation,’’ Bailey shows how Fuller’s New-York Tribune dispatches focus on the activity of nation building—Italy’s emergence as a nation state—whereas Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun carries out a tourist agenda in which Italy is a largely posthistorical and aesthetic space. Fuller emphasizes the ‘‘formation of contemporary history’’ and society in her urban-centered writings, whereas Hawthorne, employing the persona of the flaneur, interests himself in an ‘‘urban subjectivity whose orientation to the city is primarily visual’’ and thus less engaged in political or social issues. ‘‘Fuller’s and Hawthorne’s writings on Rome,’’ Bailey concludes, ‘‘emphasize two possibilities for conceiving of American urban space: as political space or as consumable spectacle.’’ Whereas Fuller ‘‘imagines a political city—a polis,’’ Hawthorne is ‘‘primarily engaged by the tourist’s or flaneur’s vision of the city’’ that nullifies both revolution and the power of the female gaze. In her reading of William Dean Howells’s A Foregone Conclusion,

Susan M. Griffin observes that ‘‘Hawthorne’s shadow’’ (in tales such as ‘‘The Birthmark’’ and ‘‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’’) falls across Howells’s story of an American artist-diplomat’s experiences in Italy, but Howells tries to liberate his own art from Hawthorne’s romantic influence. In the process of ironizing Hawthornian romance, Griffin argues, Howells anxiously explores tensions in post–Civil War American masculinity by reworking the man-woman-priest triangle of anti-Catholic polemic into a ‘‘modern instance’’ of sexual dysfunction. Using Henry James’s commentary on A Foregone Conclusion as a reference point, Griffin focuses on Howells’s depiction of the Italian priest Don Ippilito in order to explore the intersection of genre and gender issues in the novel, as Howells’s Italian priest stands not only for a vexed masculinity but also for an ‘‘archaic notion of representation.’’ Herman Melville spent much less time in Italy than Hawthorne and James, and he visited relatively late in his novelistic career—indeed, after he had written virtually all of his fiction—but just before Hawthorne was to visit the European continent. As Robert Milder shows in his essay on Melville’s 1856–1857 Mediterranean travels, however, the ‘‘great influence’’ of Melville’s journey was upon his ‘‘idea of history and America’s place in history, and consequently upon his stance as a writer as he struggled to redefine his subject matter and his relationship to a prospective audience.’’ Milder’s focus on the journal Melville kept on his journey represents one of the few critical treatments of this work, which Milder analyzes as ‘‘the working outline for a Melvillean quest narrative.’’ Melville found evidence of decline throughout the Mediterranean. He approached the Egyptian pyramids as a ‘‘symbol for the ontologically appalling,’’ and his visit to the Holy Land, particularly to the Dead Sea and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, represented a spiritual ‘‘bottoming out.’’ Melville responded more positively to Greece and Italy, but he much preferred their ancient associations to contemporary civilizations. He considered the Parthenon a ‘‘triumph of the naturalistically human over the anarchic in nature itself,’’ and he was most impressed by the colossal ‘‘scale of life’’ he discovered in Rome. In relating his Mediterranean travels to the spiritual crisis Melville would suffer during the late 1850s and early 1860s, Milder concludes his essay by discussing ‘‘Statues in Rome,’’ a lecture expressing a ‘‘contempt for modernity’’ that Melville delivered many times after he returned to the United States. Frederick Douglass visited Rome in 1887, considerably later than the other writers and artists treated in this collection, and as Robert S. Levine demonstrates in ‘‘Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’s Rome,’’ he used Rome to address the ‘‘conjoined issues of race and progress in

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the United States.’’ Levine’s essay addresses some of the same issues that Robert Martin and Priscilla Walton engage in their essays about Americans’ encounters with racially ambiguous people in Italy. Douglass consistently rejected ‘‘race pride’’ and ‘‘black separatist solutions’’ to American racial problems, and he ‘‘championed the value of racial mixing.’’ In contrast to Hawthorne and James, who seemed vexed by the racial ambiguities they encountered in Italy, Douglass found in Rome what he ‘‘most values and ultimately feels will be most useful in making his antiracist arguments in the United States: a conjunction of mixed-blood peoples (the Romans) and the rise of Western civilization.’’ As it had for Hawthorne and James (according to the essays by Hamilton, Martin, and Walton, for example), Rome attracts Douglass for its racial ‘‘otherness’’—for its position on a racial continuum from whiteness to blackness—and thus serves his own desire to undermine claims of racial purity. We believe that this collection of essays can make a significant contribution to our understanding of nineteenth-century American artists’ encounters with Italy and especially with Roman culture. Given the agitation in nineteenth-century American society over equal rights for people of ‘‘other’’ genders, races, and classes, it is not surprising that nineteenth-century American writers and artists tried to work out ‘‘local’’ issues on ‘‘foreign’’ ground even as they sought ‘‘holidays’’ from such issues. Bringing contemporary concerns about gender, race, and class to bear upon nineteenth-century texts, this collection of essays seems an especially timely contribution to nineteenth-century American studies.

notes 1. Paul Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy, 1800 –1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 19. 2. Nathalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 29. 3. Carl Maves, Sensuous Pessimism: Italy in the Work of Henry James (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 12. 4. Leonardo Buonomo, Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831–1866) (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 15. 5. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1879), 165.

Richard H. Millington

where is hawthorne’s rome? The Marble Faun and the cultural space of middle-class leisure

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Much of the interesting recent work on The Marble Faun has been engaged in one way or another in describing the cultural location of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rome: as the setting for a program of middle-class self-assertion via art worship (Richard Brodhead); as a place to engage, through the encounter with Catholicism, issues of civil and cultural order and to perform acts of national self-definition or self-defense (Robert Levine, Jenny Franchot); as a site for the expression and interrogation of ethnographic and racial fantasy (Nancy Bentley); as a map of erotic tension and the seismic register of an imploding domesticity (T. Walter Herbert).1 I also have a way of saying that The Marble Faun is more about America than Italy: Beginning with the observation that Hawthorne’s Rome is a place where—as regards the book’s main characters—nobody does much work but nobody has much fun, I will be proposing that the book is in part Hawthorne’s attempt to describe and interrogate the emergence of leisure as a definitive—as perhaps the definitive—middle-class cultural space. Site of his own laborious vacationing, Hawthorne’s Rome is located deep in leisure territory, but his Roman novel is also about what it might mean for that territory to mark out the site of meaning more generally for genteel American culture. In order to make sense of this claim, I will attempt three things in this essay: to provide a brief history of the emergence of leisure in antebellum America, together with an analysis of the meanings that reside in this distinctive cultural space; to describe Hawthorne’s investment in— indeed his advocacy for—the idea of leisure earlier in his career; and to explore the interpretive consequences of seeing The Marble Faun in the light of this new cultural configuration.

toward a brief history of leisure

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On or about August 8, 1826, the American vacation was invented. The Boston newspaper proprietor Nathan Hale, writing to his father Enoch—neo-Puritan minister of the rural town of Westhampton, Massachusetts—proposes ‘‘making an excursion of a few days, in company with Mr. Webster and his family, along the south shore as far as Sandwich, where we think of leaving our families while we proceed to the cape, a part of the country which has some peculiar features, and which I have a curiosity to see. Sandwich is a very pleasant place to retire to in hot weather, to enjoy the fresh sea air, that sort of recreation which serves to invigorate one after a long confinement in town.’’ Some years later, in 1841, Hale’s wife Sarah, reflecting on twenty-five years of marriage, writes in her diary: ‘‘I feel that the turmoil and hurry of life is over with me, and I feel thankful that I have more leisure and can make a more regular disposition of my time, than when the care of very young children occupied me incessantly—I must strive that this leisure may not be wasted—With fewer causes of irritability, may I more carefully govern my temper . . . and whatever else oh my God is wrong in me, wilt thou enable me to strive against and correct it.’’ In 1846, their daughter Lucretia, employing a fully developed romantic vocabulary of pleasure, writes to her mother from Newport: ‘‘We drove upon the beach [after bathing] this aft., and the surf was glorious—the fog had all dispersed, and the water was deliciously blue. . . . This is all out of the way—for the principal thing of the place that we have seen, was last night’s hop. To me the greatest charm was the most magnificent music, that was played, the most glorious band I ever heard.’’ 2 We witness, in this twenty-year sequence of a family’s moments of recreation, a kind of vernacular history of the emergence of leisure as a distinctive and definitive feature of American middle-class culture. The minister-grandfather, silent in this exchange, made family visits but never took vacations; he worries in his letters not about access to rural pleasures—the rural is just home to him—but about the diversion of his neighbors’ attention from their labor of soul-saving. Whereas Enoch Hale’s world is a tight, coherent, theocentric circle, his urbane son, his rural boyhood perhaps reverberating in his mind, has divided his world into zones of work and zones of release, the latter a therapeutic antidote to the town’s ‘‘confinement.’’ For his wife Sarah, ‘‘leisure’’ implies a space doubly interior, a private, domestic location where her newfound time may be spent working on the inner condition of her character; yet for their daughter Lucretia, deepening her soul through the consump-

tion of the ‘‘delicious’’ experiences of the resort, the experience of leisure is no less a part of the labor of self-construction, and all three of our vacationers might be said at once to inherit and transform the ‘‘place’’ once occupied by Enoch Hale’s salvation-focused selfexamination. Taken together, these moments begin to describe a new and significant cultural space in antebellum America: the realm of leisure, a terrain—worldly and domestic, pleasurable and morally fraught, sacred and consumeristic—at once set apart from workaday life and where the deeper, truer, richer life came to reside. This is also, of course, the cultural space occupied by the reading of fiction—in a sense, it might be said to constitute the marketplace for novel writers— and one of its most advanced outposts is the Rome of the American traveler. Working from various perspectives, historians have identified some of the key features of leisure’s emergence in antebellum America. Daniel T. Rodgers, in his classic The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850 – 1920, finds in mid-century defenses and celebrations of leisure the beginnings of a moral reorientation of middle-class life: A narrative that located moral value in ceaseless effort and an ethos of vigilant selfdiscipline gives way—in response to the regimentation of industrial labor, the alienation of early ‘‘white-collar’’ workers, and the manic, unhealthful ‘‘busyness’’ of American commercial life more generally— to a sense that a life’s meanings will come to repose in the arts and practices that define leisure and set it apart from everyday life. Karen Halttunen and Stuart Blumin have seen the behaviors and institutions associated with leisure as participating in the definition of a distinctive urban middle class and as providing occasions for the demonstration of such a social identity. Other historians, such as Dona Brown, have shown how the kinds of emotions about nature and culture we overhear in Lucretia Hale’s letter are practiced and codified by means of one of the earliest and most popular of leisure practices, ‘‘scenic tourism,’’ which becomes another arena in which the experience of a certain kind of meaning becomes as well the expression of a class identity. Rodgers’s work in particular helps us see how powerfully and variously the idea of ‘‘leisure’’ reverberates through the subsequent cultural history of nineteenth-century America—that we might glimpse it not only in the taste for European travel The Marble Faun exemplifies and forecasts but in S. Weir Mitchell’s ‘‘rest cure’’ and the concept of the therapeutic; in the conception of reform at Jane Addams’s Hull House, where many activities sought to create a realm of elevating leisure for working-class people; in the popular fantasy that constructed plantation slaves as a leisure class before and after the Civil War.3

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where is hawthorne’s rome?

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Relying both on the empirical instance the Hale family offers us and on this historical work, I want to emphasize some particular features of this development in cultural history—features that will, I think, allow us to see how significantly the emergence of leisure shapes Hawthorne’s career and how much at stake the meanings of leisure are in The Marble Faun. First, it is crucial to see leisure not simply as a set of particular activities conducted in new kinds of places but as what I want to call a cultural ‘‘space,’’ an imaginative location configured by the possibilities for meaning-making operative there; thus, for all their apparent differences, both Sarah Hale’s private space of contemplation and her daughter’s Newport beach should be understood as sites of leisure, where moments of apparent ease will come to pay off in the deepening or enrichment of character. Second, no matter how far one travels to experience leisure, it is always simultaneously an internal experience, valuable both as an occasion for transforming the self and as an opportunity to express that self’s power to produce the exquisite inner reverberations that indicate gentility.4 Finally, this emergent leisure territory, when conceived of as a cultural space, has two somewhat contradictory features: It tends to configure American life as bifurcated, split between a place of significance (leisure) and a place of postponement (workaday life); yet it imagines a fertile relation between those two places, in the sense that a visit to the realm of leisure might reanimate or restore one’s capacity to live meaningfully outside it. Thus conceived, the realm of leisure can be understood as the venue for a certain kind of ideological labor, most notably the intertwined processes of forming the self and defining that self as genteel. But the example of the Hales will remind us that leisure involves labor in another, more concrete way as well. These Hales are Hawthorne’s people, members of a northeastern elite defined less by cash—like Hawthorne before the Liverpool consulship, they are often strapped for funds— than by their cultural capital, most notably their stirring sense of the import of their own acts and sensibilities. And like him, they not only occupy from time to time this ‘‘space’’ of leisure but are its operatives: Lucretia writes successful children’s books and is a pioneer in the kindergarten movement, a later expression of leisure’s revaluation of ‘‘play’’; her sister Susan is an artist and publishes an edition of her travel letters; their well-known brother Edward Everett Hale combines the careers of minister, novelist, and editor. Their investment in leisure— their working of it, we might say—reminds us that leisure not only names a locus of value different from the world of work but provides the ground for a new set of careers, Hawthorne’s among them.

hawthorne, romance, and the deeper leisure To identify the cultural space of leisure as one of antebellum middleclass culture’s most characteristic creations is to begin to see how fully Hawthorne’s career as a writer is bound up in it. I have already suggested that Hawthorne is of this sphere in two ways: as a member of the class that invents and presides over this territory, and as a writer who produces work designed to be consumed in this sphere. But Hawthorne’s attachment to leisure is at once more concrete and more conceptual than I have yet suggested. First, as Dona Brown has established, the ‘‘romantic’’ landscape tourism that emerged as one of leisure’s earliest definitive activities opened career opportunities for writers and artists able to promote or describe this activity or to capture or define the range of experiences belonging to it. Brown reminds us that Hawthorne exercised this opportunity with considerable energy and some self-ironic acuity. Several of his early sketches follow the newly established itinerary of scenic travel and, still more interestingly, comment on the ideological phenomenon he is both witnessing and promoting. Thus, ‘‘Sketches from Memory’’ includes an account of a pre-ascent evening at Ethan Crawford’s famous inn at the White Mountains, featuring an assortment of tourists and—most notably—a young poet, sporting opera glasses, who produces an all-too-facile specimen of romantic verse for the inn’s register; ‘‘My Visit to Niagara’’ not only observes his fellow tourists’ highly variable encounters with sublimity but records his own comic but ultimately successful struggle to rescue a significant encounter with the falls from the effects of what we would now call their overhyping. Several of his stories, ‘‘The Ambitious Guest’’ and ‘‘The Great Stone Face,’’ participate more straightforwardly in the endowment of particular touristic sites with a kind of imaginative value, derived, in these cases, from a famous natural disaster and popular legend, and Brown instructively cites Hawthorne’s letter to Franklin Pierce in which he humorously acknowledges the careeristic agenda of his travels, the hope that his northern tour will yield a book ‘‘by which I intend to acquire an (undoubtedly) immense literary reputation.’’ 5 If Hawthorne emerges, in some of his writing, as a characteristically self-aware purveyor of this nascent cultural tourism, his conceptual commitment to the idea of leisure runs deeper and shapes the underlying conception of his artistic project as well as its marketing strategies. Striking affinities between leisure’s alternative geography and Hawthorne’s conception of romance suggest that we might see Hawthorne, through his writings, as a prescient, deeply committed espouser of the

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values and possibilities of the leisure realm. Both in the prefaces and at moments of revelation or transformation in the fiction proper, Hawthorne invariably evokes romance as a distinctive location, a place that, by virtue of its nearness to but difference from the environs of customary life, permits a deepened version of the kind of restoration— intellectual, imaginative, psychological—that leisure’s advocates had in mind for the wearied middle-class brain-worker. Although this affinity between the restorative realms of leisure and romance is implicit in the kinds of activities and places—intimate conversation, the atmospherics of the moonlit study, even, in the case of ‘‘The Custom House,’’ losing one’s job 6 —associated with the creation of romance in the prefaces, it is in ‘‘The Old Manse’’ that the affinity between the activities of leisure and the work of the writer is most fully established and explored. A reader alert to the geography of leisure will recognize ‘‘The Old Manse’’ as a compendium of the cultural forms, attitudes, and rewards that belong to the antebellum canon of relaxation; indeed, at the level of both concrete actions and intellectual exploration, this meandering essay— or, more properly, ‘‘sketch’’—is organized according to the principles of leisure.7 This is true, in several ways, at the level of literary form: As a kind of antechamber to the tales and sketches within (and to the contemplative or interpretive experiences they will invite), it seems to place the act of reading within the domestic space it describes, and the reader is first evoked as a kind of visitor to the premises. ‘‘The Old Manse’’ is, quite concretely and systematically, constructed in the touristic mode, with Hawthorne construing himself as both host and guide— amply furnished with anecdotes—showing us around the house and grounds (as though anticipating the house’s present-day life as a museum), conducting a more formal ‘‘sight-showing’’ (‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,125) of the nearby battleground, evoking a vacationlike excursion upon the Assabeth River, dropping the names of local celebrities.8 But Hawthorne uses this essayistic version of one of leisure’s standard literary forms (the guidebook emerges into cultural prominence in America in the 1830s and 1840s) to evoke the larger ambitions of his fiction and with them the deeper values and intellectual possibilities that underwrite leisure’s claims to cultural value.9 The piece is amply stocked with passages that claim the Old Manse and its environs as part of a territory distinct from and alternative to the workaday world. The Concord River, at the edge of the house’s backyard, is described as what can only be called a leisure river, notable for its exemption from labor—‘‘While all things else are compelled to subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away, in lazy liberty, without turning a solitary spindle, or affording even water-power

enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks’’—and celebrated for its aesthetic value: ‘‘In the light of a calm and golden sunset, it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the quietude that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest’’ (‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,126). Later, Hawthorne testifies to the superior tastiness of fruit that someone else has planted, denying the old work-ethic saw that ‘‘toil sweetens the bread it earns’’—though in the next instant, forecasting the forms of suburban recreation, he celebrates the pleasures of working in the garden (‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,131). This last moment—in which an assertion is made, explored, and then modified or abandoned for its opposite— can be identified as the prevailing intellectual rhythm of ‘‘The Old Manse’’: The sketch is full of reconsiderations, in which a proposition or feeling is held up to the light, imaginatively inhabited, perhaps discarded—but without the need of definitive refutation. The effect of this sketch, with its sustained evocation of the activities and attitudes belonging to leisure, is to create, in the terrain of its reading, a space that is restorative, meditative, and conceptually open and challenging: a literary version of the leisure realm. ‘‘The Old Manse’’ tellingly reserves its hostility for the theological writing stashed in the house’s attic study—a hostility engendered, we may infer, by the excessively teleological quality, the antileisureliness, of the sermon and the tract. Perhaps its most celebratory sequence is, in effect, an account of a brief vacation, the writer’s restorative, revisionary sojourn upon the Assabeth River with Ellery Channing, which yields the following result: the chief profit of those wild days, to him and me, lay—not in any definite idea—not in any angular or rounded truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass of problematical stuff—but in the freedom which we thereby won from all custom and conventionalism, and fettering influences of man on man. We were so free today, that it was impossible to be slaves again tomorrow. When we crossed the threshold of a house, or trod the thronged pavements of a city, still the leaves of the trees, that overhung the Assabeth, were whispering to us—‘‘Be free! Be free!’’ (‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,141)

What we are witnessing in passages such as this, and in the richness and openness of the sketch’s conceptual wanderings and range of attitudes more generally, is, I think, Hawthorne’s desire to keep alive in his culture’s leisure territory something of the emotional depth and intellectual seriousness of the cultural space of earnest self-examination it inherits from its religious tradition. If he is suspicious of the excessive

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purposefulness both of the world of work and of older, religious forms of self-recovery, he is nevertheless ambitious for the effectiveness of the new cultural form he is configuring here, for, as this account of the liberating later reverberations of the Assabeth interlude implies, leisure experience is designed to bear fruit in the quotidian world. Toward the end of the piece, he provides an account of the effect of a sojourn at the Old Manse upon his visitors—an account that, for all the relaxation of its humor, sketches out a fully imagined aesthetic of leisure. The friends who visit the Manse, he notices, display an unvarying impulse to fall asleep. Rather than take this as a sign of his inadequacy as a host, Hawthorne construes this sleepiness as an achievement: ‘‘Others could give them pleasure and amusement; or instruction— these could be picked up anywhere—but it was for me to give them rest—rest in a life of trouble’’ (‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,144). His guests— the self-thwarted careerist, the embittered politician, the woman ‘‘on whose feminine nature had been imposed the heavy gift of intellectual power, such as a strong man might have staggered under, and with it the necessity to act upon the world’’ (‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,144)—turn out to suffer from nineteenth-century-itis, the very anxiety-producing and contradictory conditions of modernity that advocates of leisure hoped to assuage. Interestingly, Hawthorne, quite in accord with the emphasis of his contemporary advocates of leisure, distinguishes his version of leisure from both the purposefulness of ‘‘instruction’’ and the shallowness of mere ‘‘pleasure and amusement,’’ indicating its transformative ambitions. The sleepiness a stay at the Old Manse produces becomes a witty figure for the effects that ‘‘The Old Manse’’ itself—and the volume it introduces—aim to achieve, and Hawthorne’s claim for the efficacy of sleep fully realizes and anticipates the therapeutic ethos that will define the trajectory of middle-class leisure through the rest of the century: the great want which mankind labors under, at this present period, is—sleep! . . . It has gone distracted, through a morbid activity, and, while preternaturally wide-awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions, that seem real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character, were all things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This is the only method of getting rid of old delusions, and avoiding new ones— of regenerating our race, so that it might in due time awake, as an infant out of dewy slumber— of restoring to us the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it; both of which have been lost, in consequence of this weary

activity of brain, and torpor or passion of the heart, that now afflicts the universe. (‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,145)

What we glimpse here, through this figure of the sleepy reader, is literary leisure—Hawthornian romance—imagined as a cultural program. In ‘‘The Old Manse’’ Hawthorne— quite openly, if figuratively—allies his writing conceptually as well as economically to this new cultural space, claiming that the value of his fiction lies in its power to do the work of leisure: to remake and renovate the lives of those who vacation in ‘‘neutral territory.’’

the culture of leisure and the marble faun In the light of the historical developments I have been describing, Hawthorne might be understood as a practitioner of the ‘‘deeper leisure’’—‘‘deeper’’ because the cultural space established in his writing, while imagined as freer than its neighboring dailiness, is notably permeable to the kind of difficulty, anguish, yearning, and complexity routinely experienced but often unacknowledged in ordinary life, and because it conceives of its relation to such experience as potentially freeing and curative. Indeed, one might speculate that the remarkable body of writing that precedes his departure for England is shaped and underwritten by Hawthorne’s confidence in the power of the romance excursion to remake its traveler not by evading difficult experience but by constructing a venue for its freeing engagement.10 And The Marble Faun might seem, in turn, to be the apotheosis and culmination of Hawthorne’s commitment to a renovative ‘‘leisure’’ aesthetic, for in Hawthorne’s Rome, the elements of transgression, moral compulsion, and yearning that characterize his strongest fiction emerge in a location that, for its American characters and readers, is all excursion, all depth, all romance. But this is, as many readers have felt, a book that seems to thwart the very possibilities it opens before us; if its characters are vacationers, they are oddly unhappy ones, and the book may at last record the exhaustion of the very leisure aesthetic it celebrates. I think there can be little doubt that the Rome that Hawthorne depicts in The Marble Faun is a precinct of American leisure territory or, as he laboriously built this novel upon the foundation of his own touristic endeavors, that Hawthorne had leisure on his mind. Just as the Hales, vacationing in the 1820s, are anticipating a cultural practice that really takes off in the 1850s, so Hawthorne is on the cutting edge of

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European travel among Americans, which will become a full-blown phenomenon only after the Civil War. Although exact numbers are hard to come by, two thousand Americans each year are said to have been visiting Florence by 1858, the year Hawthorne arrived in Rome; by the end of the century, thirty thousand Americans each year were visiting Rome. What more deeply links a visit to Rome to the terrain of leisure I have been describing, though, is the kind of experience that one was to have there—the same sort of morally elevating, self-transforming, class-affirming encounter with the transcendent (whether via the countryside or, more centrally, via art and antiquities) that the Catskills or the White Mountains were to have supplied earlier in this touristic tradition; indeed, Hawthorne’s friend George Hillard set out the definitive American-authored version of this experiential itinerary in his Six Months in Italy (1853), which went through more than twenty editions during the course of the century.11 When we look to the novel itself, we find a similar conjunction of the aesthetic, the touristic, and the moral. Although there can be no doubt that this is a work deeply interested in the process of moral growth and the varieties of aesthetic experience, both of these interests unfold as part of an itinerary that obeys the narrative logic of the Roman tour. Rome seems to be full of American artists preparing big work for the home market, but the artists we come to know are always ready for a break, and being an artist and being a tourist seem to be conceived of as cognate careers. The book’s first scene, of course, is a visit to a museum, and even Miriam’s Model—whatever else he may signify—finds gainful employment in what might be called the leisure industries, posing for Roman-style paintings by expatriate artist-entrepreneurs. I do not wish to suggest by this description that Hawthorne has simply become astutely cynical about how easily the deeper leisure becomes the higher consumption. But I do want to argue that he has come to question the transformative power of the leisure space that art and reading occupy in American culture, and that this questioning takes the form, as the plot of The Marble Faun unfolds, of a kind of testing of that power. I propose, that is, to track the ‘‘career’’ of leisure within the novel and to see how well it does at its renovating work. I have already noted some of the large-scale affinities between The Marble Faun and the activities and outlooks that define leisure in antebellum America. Even a glimpse at the novel’s chapter titles gives a clear sense of the book’s shaping by leisure’s logic; the contents read like the marriage of a novel and a guidebook, so many chapters are named for the tour sites where the book’s action takes place. This feature of the book is generally taken as a sign of Hawthorne’s desire to get as much

use out of his notebook descriptions of famous Roman venues as he could—and the book did, indeed, serve later generations of tourists as a guide to their visit 12 —but I think the tourlike structure of the book is designed in part to draw our attention to the deeper uses of travel and hence to the role of leisure in cultural life more generally. Although the book undoubtedly grafts its plot of transgression and love onto a tour of Rome, the tour sites often function to focus the moral and intellectual issues the plot will raise, as when the viewing of the statue of the faun raises the issue of the costs of civility or when a visit to the catacombs seems to evoke a layered and labyrinthine understanding of the psyche. Later in the book, the two forms link up more intensely, as the working out of the emotions and meanings of Donatello’s transgression coincides with Kenyon’s summer vacation in the countryside. If the book’s activities link it definitively to the leisure realm, its narrator frequently displays a more substantial commitment to the kind of cultural criticism that led antebellum moralists to argue the need for leisure: It is the iron rule in our days, to require an object and a purpose in life. It makes us all parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than we were born in. It insists upon everybody’s adding somewhat (a mite, perhaps, but earned by incessant effort) to an accumulated pile of usefulness, of which the only use will be, to burden our posterity with even heavier thoughts and more inordinate labor than our own. No life now wanders like an unfettered stream; there is a mill-wheel for the tiniest rivulet to turn. We go all wrong, by too strenuous a resolution to go all right.13

There are many passages, especially earlier in the book, that not only espouse the renovating value of particular leisure experiences but render those experiences in language that makes the connection between leisure territory and romance territory quite apparent. If, as I will be arguing, the book will at its close reveal a skepticism about the renovating power of both of these cultural forms, it will begin by evoking their power to transform. The visit to the Capitoline Museum that— tellingly, from my point of view—begins the book really is interesting. Such a visit is indeed an obligatory stop on appreciation’s itinerary (although Hillard does not mention the faun, devoting himself almost entirely to impassioned tribute to the Dying Gladiator 14), but this encounter with the statue of the faun also calls forth, from both the narrator and the characters (with the exception of Hilda, who is just confused),

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a cosmopolitan openness of speculation, as when the narrator, quite explicit and relaxed about the statue’s genial eroticism, speculates that the deeper allure of the statue may lie in the freedom from ‘‘moral severity’’ derived from its cross-species hybridity (MF, 9–11). Miriam’s expressions of anguished yearning—‘‘For I suppose the Faun had no conscience, no remorse, no burthen on the heart, no troublesome recollections of any sort; no dark future neither!’’—give the scene a permeability to difficult emotion that makes this leisure interlude the site of a kind of complex intellectual and emotional freedom and situate it in a territory that by now will seem familiar: 20

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The resemblance between the marble Faun and [Donatello] had made a deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression on these three friends, and had taken them into a certain airy region, lifting up—as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted—their heavy, earthly feet from the actual soil of life. The world had been set afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long, of all customary responsibility for what they thought and said. (MF, 16)

As the near-echo of the Assabeth excursion from ‘‘The Old Manse’’ suggests, we have found our way, by way of leisure territory, to the liberating precincts of romance. A second such interlude, which similarly seems to associate the Roman scene with possibilities of cultural renovation, is the Sylvan Dance episode, set in the grounds of the ‘‘suburban’’ Villa Borghese. If, in the museum scene, we witness the renovating possibilities of the tour, here Hawthorne seems to have in mind the rural vacation. The narrator renders the ground of the villa as a distinctly ‘‘Arcadian’’ scene— evoking the affinity between contemporary recreation and the tradition of the pastoral, noting, via the fake ruins, the constructed quality of each place—which takes its meaning and achieves its effect through its proximity to the conditions of an adjacent urban life: Like the suddenly ebullient Donatello, who feels his Roman experience (‘‘the hard pavements, the smell of ruin, and decaying generations’’) evaporating like a cloud, ‘‘all of us, after long abode in the cities, have felt the blood gush more joyously through our veins with the first breath of rural air’’ (MF, 74– 75). The sense of emotional and physical release that this mini-vacation delivers to the cavorting Miriam and Donatello takes a communal form when they encounter a group of wandering musicians and are joined in the dance by a cross section of the Roman populace and assorted tourists. Hawthorne establishes the seriousness and cultural prestige of this form of leisure by likening the dancers to the ‘‘bas-relief’’ on an antique

vase or sarcophagus. Like the carnival, much later in the book, this dance seems to enact not simply a moment of release but a rich acknowledgment of the complex relation between pleasure and restraint in human culture.15 And like the scene in the museum, this episode is accompanied by reminiscences of descriptions of romance territory from earlier in his career (Miriam, momentarily freed from melancholy, is said to ‘‘sport madly in the sunshine before the cavern’s mouth’’ [MF, 83], another echo of ‘‘The Old Manse’’ [‘‘Old Manse,’’ 1,147]), as if to insist on the connection between these cultural forms. Yet for all the power and freedom they claim on leisure’s behalf, both of these carefully configured episodes are curiously punctuated, ending surprisingly and abruptly—in both cases the loss is marked by the appearance of the Model, a walking embodiment of repetition and compulsion—thus calling into question the strength and sustainability of such forms of release. Interestingly, Hawthorne’s narrator observes that Americans are particularly obtuse to the benefits of moments of cultural opening like this sylvan frolic or the carnival, implying a principle that may forecast Hilda and Kenyon’s lapse into unresponsiveness at the end of the book: Real Americans don’t dance. Despite these bleak hints, these early evocations of a rich and freeing leisure experience suggest a realm of promising moral possibility as we follow the plot toward its central transgression. It is to the later chapters of the novel, where the meanings and consequences of Donatello’s murder of the Model are explored, that we must turn in order to follow the intertwined careers of leisure and romance. The book’s most significant, inclusive, and farseeing working-out of the claims and possibilities of leisure as a cultural space comes in the long sequence of events that records, as an intertwined process, the deepening of Donatello’s character, his freeing from obsessive guilt, and the restoration of his love for Miriam. What is striking about this process, from the point of view of this essay, is how fully it alludes to and depends on an amalgamation of the leisurely arts. However richly the architecture, the artifacts, and the family history we encounter at the Monte Beni estate evoke the questions of moral development that now occupy the novel, the estate is emphatically a vacation site (it would not be hard to write the brochure: an exquisite wine that’s only drinkable on the premises!). The rusticated Donatello and the sojourning Kenyon begin Donatello’s recovery with an art-, wine-, legend-, and speculation-filled interlude there, which begins to measure the expansion of character that accompanies Donatello’s fall into moral complexity. Next comes what can only be called a cure by tourism, as Kenyon leads Donatello slowly out of guilt and toward mature love by making a circuit of the region’s main

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tourist attractions, which at last produces the reunion and reconciliation of Miriam and Donatello under the famous statue of Pope Julius (itself one of Hawthorne’s favorite Perugian attractions).16 Several features of this curative process need further attention, both because they show us how fully Hawthorne had seen, at this relatively early moment, the elements that would give the sphere of leisure its cultural power during the rest of the century, and because they help us understand his investment in the conception of experience that leisure implies. The first is the part played by Kenyon: He hands in his sculptor’s chisel and becomes a proto-therapist, providing both the theory behind Donatello’s cure—‘‘he will re-create the world by the new eyes with which he will regard it. He will escape, I hope, out of a morbid life, and find his way into a healthy one’’ (MF, 284)—and the guidance and conversation that assist in it. Kenyon’s role gives embodiment to the restorative conception of art we glimpsed in ‘‘The Old Manse’’; it also helps us to see, and to understand that Hawthorne has seen, that under the regime of a curative conception of leisure, the artist and the therapist are one—an intuition that Daniel Rodgers confirms in identifying S. Weir Mitchell’s ‘‘rest cure’’ and early psychotherapy as one of the main cultural trajectories followed by the antebellum conception of leisure.17 The cure itself unfolds as a pointedly constructed test of, and testimony to, the transformative power of leisure experience, as the compulsion evident in the obsessive penance Donatello performs at every available altar gives way under the influence of tourism’s more relaxed rituals. The emphasis on repetition in the presentation of Donatello’s penitence may even replay, in a psychological register, the worries over the mechanical quality of industrial work that led many nineteenth-century reformers to focus their attention on leisure and its distribution.18 At the end of this sequence, another good role opens up for Kenyon—it is becoming easier to see why this organization of culture might have looked so promising to a writer—as he presides as priest at the emblematic marriage between Donatello and Miriam that marks the completion of the cure. Or perhaps we should say that Kenyon merely assists at this sacrament, for the final blessing, at least rhetorically, is given by the statue of Pope Julius itself, and it is perhaps not too much to say that Miriam and Donatello are not only married at a famous tourist site but by one. It is, of course, the triumph of leisure in present-day middle-class culture, and its attendant reduction to banality, that makes Hawthorne’s presentation of this cure seem like parody. But the book treats Donatello’s restoration seriously and passionately, in a phrasing that might hint at a writer’s most cherished ambitions to transform his readers:

When he ratifies his cure by speaking Miriam’s name, Donatello’s tone ‘‘bespoke an altered and deepened character; it told of a vivified intellect, and of spiritual instruction that had come through sorrow and remorse; so that—instead of the wild boy, the thing of sportive, animal nature, the sylvan Faun—here was now the man of feeling and intelligence’’ (MF, 320). But what is of course most striking, in light of this seemingly authoritative demonstration of the moral efficacy of leisure practices, is what comes next: the book’s frustration of this very achievement, in which it seems to have invested so much, which begins almost at the moment of its accomplishment and yields, in effect, the excision of Miriam and Donatello from the book. With Donatello’s cure apparently accomplished, his story gives way to the rescue of Hilda and the arrangement of the novel’s second marriage, that between Hilda and Kenyon. But Hawthorne sets as the price for this all-American marriage the erasure of the very moral possibilities opened up by Miriam and Donatello during their curative excursion in leisure territory; Hilda accepts Kenyon only after enforcing his recantation of the mildly complex moral notion that Donatello may have developed as a human being through his encounter with sin—the very process of growth that Kenyon’s ‘‘therapy’’ has been designed to bring about. Many readers of the novel have noticed this defeat by Hilda’s censoriousness of the values implicit in Miriam and Donatello’s story, and have offered interpretations of it.19 But what I find striking in light of the book’s sustained evocation of the cultural possibilities of the deeper leisure is that the turn taken at the novel’s end is not only, in my terms, rendered as a defeat of leisure but as a defeat by it. I mean by this that Miriam and Donatello are deprived of power during the last chapters of the novel by being sequestered within a little leisure territory inside the book, a location that is suddenly to be understood as distinct from and subordinate to the novel proper. Thus they may appear in the book and even address Kenyon in the old vocabulary of moral complexity, but they may do so only when identified as denizens of the touristic realm, tricked out as Peasant and Contadina and meeting up with Kenyon as he takes a walk in the campagna along the Via Appia just outside Rome, an established and important stop on the itinerary of the Roman tour. It is here that Kenyon—St. Peter, junior—twice denies the theory of the fortunate fall he has formerly endorsed and is told by Miriam where to await Hilda’s reappearance. The complex couple next appears at the carnival where, still costumed as Peasant and Contadina, they are arrested—an event that, obeying the new causeand-effect logic that now controls the plot, produces Hilda’s release. What we are witnessing in these scenes is the thinning out of the pos-

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sibilities that the book has been claiming all along for the experiences of leisure—and that Hawthorne, all along, has associated with romance. The restorative and playful mix of order and transgression that marks the carnival as the preeminent form of the European version of a deeply conceived recreative culture is split apart and shrunken into opposed constituents of successful repression (the arrest, the silencing of Miriam and Donatello within the book) and mere relief, as Kenyon welcomes Hilda back from a milder, safer leisure interlude—we are invited to ‘‘fancy that she had been snatched away to a Land of Picture, that she had been straying with Claude in the golden light which he used to shed over his landscapes’’ (MF, 452)—and she, some pages later, rewards the now fully self-censored Kenyon with the promise of (a somewhat chilly) domestic bliss. The last installment in this sequence of scenes that records the truncation of Miriam and Donatello’s participation in the novel replays, in thinned-out form, their earlier marriage scene, which is, as we have seen, leisure culture’s triumphant achievement. This time, Hilda and Kenyon are the conjugal couple and Miriam presides, but in a form designed to measure the recent reduction in meaning’s scope within the novel. Ironically, this moment—the final action taken in the novel proper—takes place in the Pantheon, of all the sites in Rome the one Hawthorne found most powerful, and most pointedly to suggest, by contrast, the mere ‘‘snugness’’ of ‘‘all our modern civilization.’’ 20 Miriam, disguised, silent, and unspoken to, extends ‘‘her hands with a gesture of benediction,’’ but ‘‘those extended hands, even while they blessed, seemed to repel, as if Miriam stood on the other side of a fathomless abyss, and warned them from its verge’’ (MF, 461). What is the nature of Miriam’s abyss? What boundary does she warn the couple from? The process of excision, blocking, and frustration that brings the novel to its uncomfortable close—and which necessitates, as I have argued, the imprisonment of Miriam and Donatello through their reduction into the merely, the thinly touristic—forecloses many possibilities within The Marble Faun. But surely one among them is the possibility that the arts and experiences that comprise the cultural place of leisure might operate in fertile and pointed relation to the larger cultural world whose restraints they momentarily lift. For if Hawthorne has been prescient in seeing the possibilities implicit in the cultural geography of leisure, here he is equally acute in forecasting the nature of its demise. Miriam’s mute farewell to her successfully self-censoring counterparts, denizens-to-be of the thinner aesthetic and emotional atmosphere of ‘‘home,’’ is also a farewell to a set of emotional and moral complexities, and to a strategy for admitting those complexities into personal and cultural life. Leisure, like Hawthorne’s— or, better, Hilda

and Kenyon’s—Rome, becomes a sequestered, curiously empty site of merely visitable meanings, which mean only there and stay behind as one returns to the self-evacuated thinness of ‘‘actual’’ life.

notes 1. Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 4; Robert S. Levine, ‘‘‘Antebellum Rome’ in The Marble Faun,’’ American Literary History 2 (1990): 19–38; Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 350 –58; Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 2; T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 213–72. 2. All citations are taken from the Hale Family Papers, located in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. Quoted by permission. For a fuller account of the invention of the American vacation, see Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 1. My claim for this date is, of course, more rhetorical than literal, but Aron’s work demonstrates that the Hales were in at the very beginnings of what would emerge as a distinctive middle-class cultural form— to be distinguished from the travels of a small, aristocratic elite to such sites as Newport during the later eighteenth century. 3. Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850 –1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), chap. 4; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830 – 79 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), chap. 6; Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760 – 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chaps. 5 and 6; Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), chaps. 1 and 2. I am not alone in trying to track the literary reverberations of this history. In fine, relatively recent studies Gillian Brown (Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990]), Nicholas Bromell (By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993]), and Michael Newbury (Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997]) have explored the complex meanings of work in antebellum fiction, and William A. Gleason has juxtaposed Thoreau and especially later writers to the ‘‘play’’ theorists who are leisure’s intellectual advocates in the later nineteenth century in The Leisure Ethic: Work and Play in American Literature, 1840 –1940 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). In America’s Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre (Athens: Ohio

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University Press, 1998), Kristie Hamilton provides a rich analysis of the relation between the development of the ‘‘sketch’’ as a dominant literary genre and the investment of leisure with cultural value (see especially chapters 1 and 2) and offers several valuable discussions of Hawthorne as a writer of sketches; Sandra Tomc has analyzed via N. P. Willis the complex cultural pose of the writer as person of leisure in ‘‘An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure,’’ American Quarterly 49 (1997): 780 –805. 4. See, for instance, Dona Brown’s observation that what came to distinguish the truly genteel tourist was his or her capacity to achieve (and evidence) a deep, romantic, internal response to the landscape (Inventing New England, 59). 5. See Brown, Inventing New England, chap. 2, especially 41– 43, 45– 47, 56–57, and 68–70. The letter she cites is from Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Letters, 1813–1843 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 224. 6. On Hawthorne’s thinking about forms of work in ‘‘The Custom House,’’ see Newbury, Figuring Authorship, 119–23. 7. On the features of the sketch as a genre and its distinction from the traditional ‘‘moral essay,’’ see Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook, 35– 46. Citations from ‘‘The Old Manse’’ are taken from the Library of America edition of Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), which reproduces the text of the Centenary Edition. 8. Sandra Tomc discusses Hawthorne’s conformation to the established pose of writer as man of leisure in ‘‘The Old Manse’’ in ‘‘An Idle Industry,’’ 788–89. 9. For a description of early American guidebooks, see Brown, Inventing New England, chap. 1. 10. For a fuller discussion of this aspect of Hawthornian romance, see my Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. 3. 11. The numerical estimates are taken from Paul R. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy, 1800 –1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), 3, as is the estimate of the significance of Hillard’s book (29); see also his account of various American stances toward Rome (3– 6) and his account of their encounters with art (chap. 6). For an excellent brief discussion of the cultural meanings of the Roman visit in relation to the novel, see Richard H. Brodhead’s ‘‘Introduction’’ to the Penguin edition of The Marble Faun (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), xi–xvi; also useful is Thomas Woodson’s ‘‘Historical Commentary’’ in his edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980). For a full history of American encounters with Rome, see William Vance’s magisterial America’s Rome (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). I have relied on Dona Brown, Daniel Rodgers, and Cindy Aron for my understanding of the pace of American vacationing. 12. Baker, The Fortunate Pilgrims, 28. 13. The Marble Faun, vol. 14 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel

Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 239. Subsequent citations appear in the text abbreviated MF. Interestingly, this passage is cited by Daniel T. Rodgers (The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850 –1920, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) as, in its willingness to attack usefulness outright, a particularly avant-garde instance of leisure advocacy. 14. George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883; originally published 1853), 181–84. 15. William Vance offers a much more skeptical reading of this ‘‘Arcadian’’ sequence, seeing its claims of release as vitiated from the start by moral squeamishness, in America’s Rome, vol. 1, 113–25. 16. See The French and Italian Notebooks, 260. 17. Rodgers, The Work Ethic, 111–14. Richard Brodhead offers a brilliant brief analysis of Kenyon as ‘‘an early representative of the culture of secular humanism and humanistic therapy’’ in his ‘‘Introduction’’ to the Penguin edition, xix. In this age of contextualization, it is hard to resist noting the perhaps negligible fact that George Hillard’s account of his visit to Perugia describes a visit to the local insane asylum, known as one of the best in Italy and apparently conducted on the most enlightened principles, also cognate with the logic of leisure (‘‘Every window in the building commands an enchanting prospect . . .’’) (Six Months in Italy, 477–78). 18. Rodgers, The Work Ethic, chap. 4. 19. Readings of the book that have particularly seen its ending as a combat between competing cultural value systems include Nina Baym’s discussion in The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 228– 48; my own in Practicing Romance, chap. 7; Richard Brodhead’s in The School of Hawthorne, chap. 4, and in his ‘‘Introduction’’ to the Penguin edition, ix–xxix; and Myra Jehlen’s in American Incarnation: The Individual, the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), chap. 5. 20. The French and Italian Notebooks, 60 – 61. Hawthorne gives this and several of his own earlier observations to Kenyon in this scene, which only intensifies, I think, one’s sense of the sculptor’s failure to apply the complex perspectives he discovers in the leisure sphere to his nontouristic experience.

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‘‘an awful freedom’’ hawthorne and the anxieties of the carnival

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The eight years that separate Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘‘first’’ three novels from the last finished novel, The Marble Faun, are undoubtedly responsible in large part for the assumptions that the Faun is radically different from the other works and that it is in the nature of Rome to have prompted a new, hostile response on Hawthorne’s part. Although it is indisputable that Hawthorne reacted strongly to what he saw, described in Terence Martin’s summary, as Rome’s ‘‘ugliness and hypocrisy,’’ it is surely too binaristic to see Rome as, once again in Martin’s words, the ‘‘antithesis’’ of New England. It is perhaps more accurate to describe Hawthorne’s response to Rome, as to slavery, the great social debate of his time, as ‘‘divided and swirling,’’ 1 corresponding to a radical sense of contradiction, what we might term a love/hate relationship in which the degree of hatred depends on a concomitant degree of love. Walter Herbert, in a complex reading of the Hawthornes in Italy, has argued convincingly for Hawthorne’s experience of a devastating ‘‘crisis’’ and ‘‘psychic collapse.’’ 2 Herbert’s psychoanalytical and new-historicist reading allows for the construction of Italy as a space of women’s freedom (he adduces the role, for example, of Madame de Stae¨l) that threatened Hawthorne’s sense of his own autonomy. The price of this reading, however, is a loss of social context. We get a personal drama instead of an historical drama involving race and gender, both of which emerge in the charivari of the Roman carnival. As Nancy Bentley 3 has argued, ‘‘the thematics of Rome spring out of an antebellum matrix’’ on the eve of the Civil War. Mark Kemp asserts 4 the absence not only of direct commentary on U.S. political debates of the time but also of a concrete sense of the Italian political context—no contemporary Italian political figure or issue is mentioned (aside from the Pope). For Kemp, The Mar-

ble Faun offers ‘‘a disguised ideological narration.’’ 5 Other critics, notably Robert S. Levine, have argued for Hawthorne’s ‘‘culturally specific representation of Rome’s body politic.’’ 6 Certainly the novel’s closure, with the copyist Hilda carried back to America to be a ‘‘household Saint,’’ 7 allows Kenyon, the male artist and stand-in for Hawthorne, to escape the threatened decomposition of the self. It is not insignificant that he must also explicitly renounce the intimacy between men that has haunted his career: Kenyon tells Miriam, ‘‘I am a man, and between man and man, there is always an insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other’s hands, and therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart-sustenance, from his brother man, but from woman— his mother, his sister, or his wife’’ (MF, 285). The odd inclusion of this episode and its defensiveness (addressed to whom?) indicate that anxieties over gender roles, and specifically samesex relations, were essential in the response to the carnival as to all loss of fixed identity. Instead of looking once again at the terrors that Rome held for Hawthorne, in a new and unfamiliar culture, faced with a degree of cultural difference that he had never known before, I want to look rather at a sense of continuity within his writing—a terror of a slippery sense of selfhood that can be seen from Hawthorne’s early work onward. The repeated ‘‘might have been’’ of The Marble Faun is not simply a narrative uncertainty, but an absence of all attempts to fix identity. We need to go back to these early texts to explore the central sources of anxiety in gender, race, and species. Even in the heart of Puritan New England, Hawthorne described a terror at the potential loss of gendered identity, a loss to which he returned over and over again, as if revisiting the scene of the crime.8 In an odd and relatively littleknown narrative from 1834, Hawthorne locates his ambivalent response to sexual and racial ambiguity in a context of parental abuse and gender performance. ‘‘Passages from a Relinquished Work’’ is introduced by an apparently comic account of the speaker’s childhood as the ward of the enthusiastic and violent Parson Thumpcushion. As the parson accompanies his sermons by emphatic blows to his cushion, so his domestic regime is sustained by religion and discipline, ‘‘daily prayer,’’ and ‘‘innumerable stripes.’’ 9 The speaker departs from this childhood home to take up a life as ‘‘a wandering story teller’’ (‘‘Passages,’’ 76), a position that, as he acknowledges, resists his guardian and father figure, the parson, by combining two occupations that prompt horror—the novelist and the actor. Throughout his career, as Frederick Crews has argued,10 one senses Hawthorne’s feeling that he, too, has betrayed the fathers in this

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way—in The Blithedale Romance, for instance, by becoming the passive poet Coverdale and being at once attracted to and horrified by the wizard and showman Westervelt. In The Marble Faun, the central act, depicted as a fall of man, is a parricide in the murder of the Model or monk, explicitly called the ‘‘Father’’ (MF, 186). Rome’s imperial past and papal present make it a masculine city of the fathers, with whom Hawthorne, an orphan young on his father’s death and a nephew perhaps seduced by his uncle, is in repeated anguished conflict. The refusal of the Father is a repeated strategy for independence, often unsuccessful. As ‘‘My Kinsman Major Molineux’’ shows, the denial of the Father is a political gesture (in the context of reflections on the American Revolution, as well as arguments on behalf of women and slaves) and a personal act of complicity, in which the ‘‘dark’’ carnival of shame acts through Robin’s acquaintances. In ‘‘Passages from a Relinquished Work,’’ the dual attractions of these lives of apparent freedom are echoed in the speaker’s companionship with a young pilgrim and evangelist. The friendship between the two is quite exceptional, although they may form a ‘‘singular couple’’ in a ‘‘union’’ that appears ‘‘permanent’’ (‘‘Passages,’’ 83). Part of what is at stake here is a joining of philosophical opposites—love and punishment, art and morality, sobriety and pleasure—that, it is suggested, need to be brought together, either one alone representing a fatal one-sidedness. Religion is, as the story makes clear, a variety of theatrical performance. While the evangelist speaks in the school, the storyteller repairs to the tavern. There, he is introduced to a greater confusion, prompted by the actors. For if the earlier binaries suggested a permanent and fixed identity in conflict with its opposites, the world of the theater suggests that all identity is changeable and assumed, not given. The first person the storyteller converses with is ‘‘a young person of doubtful sex.’’ He is mystified by the actor’s ability to assume both sexes: ‘‘If a gentleman, how could he have portrayed the singing-girl, the night before, in No Song No Supper. Or if a lady, why did she enact Young Norval, and now wear a green coat and white pantaloons in the character of Little Pickle?’’ (‘‘Passages,’’ 87). The phallic references suggest a playfulness that later in his career Hawthorne would often suppress. At the same time, they bring a biological view of sex and gender into contrast with a performative one, to adopt Judith Butler’s argument.11 Is gender given or performed? Can one be a lady and play the single horn of the narwhal? Or is the vaunted phallus more like a diminutive pickle than a mythic unicorn of the sea? The pronouncements of moral certainty that the Parson delivers are here under deconstruction. Good and evil, like male and female, turn out to be not only

‘‘fellow travelers,’’ as Butler terms them, but in fact similarly cultural effects rather than essences. In a later work, The Blithedale Romance, disguise is linked to deceit and danger. Old Moody’s movable eye patch indicates a deceptiveness that betrays his own inadequate paternity. But it is the wizard Westervelt who acts as the impresario and whose lack of identity is linked to phallic display. Partly melodramatic and Gothic villain, Westervelt threatens the mesmeric control that so terrified Hawthorne and that he equated with sexual possession. Westervelt’s presence is seductive and terrifying. His mystery does not reveal a fundamental instability of gender or identity but a concrete presence of ventriloquism, in a transaction that shifts Hawthorne’s sexual fears to the women allegedly under the magician’s spell. As James Mellow has pointed out,12 part of this scene was omitted when Hawthorne reprinted ‘‘Passages from a Relinquished Work,’’ an act of self-censorship that signaled his desire to become a public writer and respectable author. The original text makes it clear in its reference to ‘‘effeminate men’’ and ‘‘painted women’’ that what the story reveals is an anxiety regarding the fluidity of gender. Hawthorne draws, of course, on the traditional Puritan fear of the theater, in a context that makes his own satire of Puritanism visible. His storyteller rather comically responds to gender confusion by a textual shrug: ‘‘In either case, the dress was pretty, and the wearer bewitching’’ (‘‘Passages,’’ 87), and so he steps forward and begins his performance. This comic ending anticipates Joe E. Brown’s comment at the end of Some Like It Hot, when he discovers that his beloved is a man in drag: ‘‘Nobody’s perfect.’’ The entrance into this indeterminacy of gender is to be found at the door out of the father’s house: The loss of the Father is the loss of certainty and an essential view of identity. Leaving behind the binaries of Puritan ontology, the storyteller is now confronted with a world of appearances to which he promptly succumbs. To tell stories is to perform many genders; this openness to a multiplicity of selves and experiences was always a source of both terror and attraction for Hawthorne. There was, of course, a traditional source for such explorations of theatricality: in the masque. Although that genre has often been cited as the origin of Hawthorne’s method, in fact his writing rather insistently argues against the fixed allegorical meanings of the masque. One place for exploring this is the masquerade scene of The Blithedale Romance, the fiction that, as Gore Vidal has put it, is Hawthorne’s only work that is not a romance. ‘‘Voices, male and feminine’’ 13 allow for a confusion between reality and imagination. The allusions of the passage move from the social seen as the theatrical (the ‘‘Indian chief, brandishing his tomahawk’’ or ‘‘Jim Crow’’ 14) to the mythological (Diana and

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Actaeon). In Blithedale as in The Scarlet Letter, it is the forest that allows a place for such ‘‘revels.’’ As in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the pastoral offers a sexual and romantic freedom that is at once enticing and unsettling. May one find oneself unable to awake from the dream? That more is at stake than romance or sexual disguise in such carnivalesque passages may be suggested by the embedded tale from ‘‘Passages from a Relinquished Work,’’ ‘‘Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.’’ Here, the lack of fixed meaning is attributed partly to the dangers of oral transmission—there is a sustained joke about misperception and the falseness of storytelling—that indicates anxiety about accuracy and meaning, in other words, about the rejection of the Word as the source of truth. But linked to this narratological quandary— can any story tell the truth?—and its theological sources is a thematics of race, one that runs through Hawthorne’s antebellum writings. The unreliable traveler’s tale begins by recounting the murder of Mr. Higginbotham by ‘‘an Irishman and a nigger’’ (‘‘Passages,’’ 91), significantly, of course, the two most marginalized social groups in nineteenth-century America. Later tellings of the tale identify the murderer as ‘‘an Irishman and a mulatto’’ (‘‘Passages,’’ 95). The most troubled identification is provided by a traveler who ‘‘himself had a deep tinge of negro blood’’ and who is at pains to insist that ‘‘there was no colored man,’’ while he himself, in his anxiety, is transformed into a ‘‘yellow man’’ (‘‘Passages,’’ 94). If the mulatto remains an apparent constant, it is because this figure represents so clearly a merging of apparently different races, thereby questioning the American binary of race. The danger of miscegenation is that one cannot ‘‘know’’ who is who: A racial continuum promises to be at least as threatening as a sexual one. In The Marble Faun the question of ‘‘race’’ centers on Miriam and her possible Jewishness, although it should be noted that Italy is itself treated as a kind of racial identity, linked to the northern European construction of the South and its colonial implications. As Bentley puts it, ‘‘Italians were widely perceived as racially distanced from the Northern European nations, as close on the scale to dark skinned savages as to Anglo-Saxons.’’ 15 One of the greatest dangers of the carnival lies in its metaphoric links to political instability and freedom, its implicit evocation of the mob or the slave revolt. Miriam as the Dark Lady is a figure of mystery and speculation. Whatever the specifics of her origins (and they can never really be known), she retains a role as the purveyor of history— crucial in a novel that centers on two Americans who want characteristically to deny history and hence to deny experience. Her wedding gift, the charmlike necklace of seven Etruscan stones, echoes the lost sevenbranched candlestick of the Jews, buried in the Tiber, and suggests that

a return to America, in symbolic terms at least, is no more possible than Hester Prynne’s return to England; there will always be a residue of the past incorporated in the self. Rome’s layered history is a sign of the impossibility of origins. There can be only repetition. The permeable boundaries of self, the use of costume as identity, glide ever so softly into the boundaries of species, a part of the masquerade tradition but one that takes on particular meaning in the context of the anxieties of race and species in the nineteenth century. The anxiety of speciesism, the fear of the monstrous as the mixed breed, joins the sexual and the racial. Hawthorne’s reworking of Shakespearean romance in ‘‘The May Pole of Merry Mount’’ expresses the terror of a union with the natural. In this story of ‘‘carnival,’’ as Hawthorne calls it, the monsters are ‘‘Gothic, though perhaps of Grecian ancestry.’’ 16 A similar opposition, central to nineteenth-century aesthetics, underlies the portrayal of the ‘‘Greek’’ Donatello and the Gothic monk in The Marble Faun; like the Gothic narrative and its dead hand of the past, the Gothic body is muffled and concealed, while the Greek body is exposed and voluptuous, but for all that still threatening and capable of deception. The naked body is always already dressed, visible in the light of cultural experience and expectation. Hawthorne’s journal for April 18, 1858, is well-known because it includes his first notice of a sculptured faun, copied from that of Praxiteles. That figure initially strikes him as ‘‘pleasant to look at,’’ 17 until he makes an odd association, recalling ‘‘that ugly, bearded woman, who was lately exhibited in England, and by some supposed to have been engendered betwixt a human mother and an orang-outang,’’ a form of conception that produces only ‘‘a wretched monster’’ (FIN, 174). Bentley remarks on Hawthorne’s contrast between the faun who is ‘‘linked so prettily, without monstrosity to the lower tribes’’ and the ‘‘transgressive’’ nature of the bearded woman.18 The faun is charming where the bearded woman is ugly, locating the two in a tense antithesis. What is most striking in this passage from the notebook is its apparently unconscious swerve from gender to species—a signal of Hawthorne’s unease with a lack of clear definition and proper identity. What would come of the mating of a human and an orang-outang? was a question not merely personal or aesthetic in the 1850s. For Hawthorne, following the example of Poe in ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’’ is producing a form of black panic that was widespread in the discourse of slavery. It may seem like a reflection of a dream of enchantment, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but what reveals itself is a link between the bearded woman and illicit sexuality, an unconscious identification of androgyny and miscegenation. Theories of descent of species made

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the uniqueness of the human a threatened assumption, centering particularly on the figure of the new woman, who in denying her femininity might be revealed to be only an animal. Describing the nineteenthcentury debate on race, Robert Young calls attention to the anxiety about hybridity and shows that ‘‘theories of race were thus also covert theories of desire.’’ 19 The anxiety was heightened by the realization that identities (race or species) were no longer seen as fixed but fluid. Four days later, Hawthorne, visiting the English artists in Rome, returns to the faun and the anxieties it (or he) provokes. Part of what troubles Hawthorne is the nudity of classical or neoclassical sculpture: For him, ‘‘clothes are as natural to him [man] as his skin,’’ for man ‘‘is no longer a naked animal’’ (FIN, 177). The passage, once again, links bestiality and gender, here, an assertive femininity. Looking at William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra, Hawthorne sees ‘‘a terribly dangerous woman . . . likely to spring upon you like a tigress’’ (FIN, 177): the impression of racial terror (in Cleopatra) and the threat of the beast in a misogynistic context.20 The faun arouses less fear, although it similarly evokes the question of the natural and the proper because it avoids the terror of the feminine. Returning in fascination to the faun, Hawthorne finds a ‘‘peculiar charm’’ (FIN, 178). As with the monstrous women, the faun suggests a crossing of racial and gender boundaries, as well as one between the human and the animal. Imagining his own novel, Hawthorne proposes a ‘‘story’’ ‘‘contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race, a family with the faun-blood in them’’ (FIN, 178). Miscegenation threatens the order of things and puts into question the ‘‘natural’’ superiority of whites. The faun’s crossbreeding is charming, though, even erotically enticing, just as Donatello will become the erotic center of that just-being-thought-of novel. The faun’s beauty is an appeal to the forbidden, to a loss of ‘‘civilized’’ identity. The following week Hawthorne returns to his faun, justifying his obsession with the idea of ‘‘writing a little Romance’’ about it. This time, Hawthorne is alone, unaccompanied by his family, and accordingly lets down his guard. He will now require (for the romance of course) a ‘‘minutely itemized detail’’ of the faun and lovingly records the nudity about which he had complained a week earlier. The fact that the faun’s ‘‘whole front’’ is ‘‘exposed, displaying a very beautiful form’’ now leads him into a celebration of the male body, with ‘‘a voluptuous mouth’’ and a ‘‘sensual nature’’ (FIN, 191– 92). Two parts of the faun’s body are particularly fetishized: the ears and the tail, both of which, as displaced genitals, are invisible (it is the concealed, of course, that is

erotic, not the revealed; or rather, as Roland Barthes put it, it is the faille, or gap, that provides jouissance). Both are in a sense used as forms of preterition, calling forth that which will not be shown, allowing the gaze and interdicting it at the same time. The permeability of species boundaries makes the faun into a kind of enfant sauvage, testing the limits of the human. The repeated reference in The Marble Faun to the faun as a ‘‘simpleton’’ or even ‘‘half-wit’’ (MF, 158) locates the text in a cultural discourse of intellectual deficiency that could be applied to ontogeny as to phylogeny. Donatello is a childlike creature, much as the newly colonized are children, awaiting instruction. Hawthorne’s romanticizing of the past, and his fascination with the nude male body, leads him to praise the simple Arcadian charms and simultaneously fear their implications for an unrepressed self that was subject to the fever of Rome. As a ‘‘simpleton,’’ in the terms dictated by the period, Donatello must not reproduce but must withdraw from the world. His mental insufficiency was to become in the mid-nineteenth century grounds for institutionalization, just as Rome, insisting on its permanent childishness in the carnival, must give way to a newer, more adult world. Growing up means leaving ‘‘Rome’’ behind. From his first appearance, in the French and Italian Notebooks, the faun is ‘‘friendly and wild,’’ and one sign of his mixed nature is his ‘‘lengthened but not preposterous ears.’’ The long ears are balanced by a ‘‘little tail which we infer, behind’’ (FIN, 178). We infer what we cannot see, and in so doing we increase, not decrease, the presence of the tail. In the April 30 entry, the ears and tail are there again; this time, the ears are ‘‘definite signs’’ of the faun’s ‘‘animal nature,’’ and ‘‘a tail is probably hidden under his garment’’ (FIN, 192). The misplaced, presumed tail is the sign of a variable or displaced sexuality; it is also a gothicizing of the classical statue, which by its nature may not be taken hold of— it is intact and self-determined, a closed and not an open text. Hawthorne’s novel, despite its title, is Gothic, and classical Rome is almost entirely absent. The faun’s ears, Hawthorne writes, once again in preterition, are not ‘‘preposterous,’’ or literally with front and back reversed.21 In the version of this passage included in the novel, the narrator speaks coyly of a ‘‘certain caudal appendage’’ (MF, 10) linking this romantic figure of innocence to the more troubling idea of ‘‘brute kindred,’’ or once again the threat of the bestial. The faun’s androgyny, expressed in its ‘‘full and rounded outlines’’ in the place of a ‘‘slender grace’’ (FIN, 191), prompts desire and a playful search for the concealed genitals, whereas women who cross boundaries of gender are monstrous. Partly this has to do with the association, made clear to Haw-

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thorne in Rome, of masculinity with the privilege of a public self. He saw the question embodied in his own daughter the following year: ‘‘Una kept wishing that she were a boy, and could plunge into the fun and uproar as [her brother] Julian would’’ (FIN, 497). Classical culture allowed for a variation of male types, but women who sought a similar fluidity of gender would meet a different response. Una’s succumbing to the ‘‘Roman fever,’’ or malaria, would later be imitated by Henry James in his tale Daisy Miller (1878). In both cases, the physical illness is seen at least in part to derive from a moral violation and to participate in a surveillance of female freedom— or of sexuality in general, for it is the same ill wind that will do in Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach on the beach at Venice, punishing him for the eruption of his repressed desire. Harriet Hosmer, the American sculptor, dressed in ‘‘a practical man’s smock . . . with a man’s shirt front, collar, and cravat’’ 22 and was the ‘‘prote´ge´e’’ of actress Charlotte Cushman. The two women, according to James R. Mellow, established a ‘‘cozy me´nage’’ with several other women, leading to Story’s somewhat homophobic mot, calling the group the ‘‘harem(scarem).’’ Hawthorne’s antipathy to such women seems to have spilled over into his notorious account of Margaret Fuller’s final years, an account that seems indeed to testify to a ‘‘secret animus.’’ 23 The virulence of that account, and its apparent settling of scores, owes not a little, I believe, to the troubled emotions provoked by the lesbian circle in Rome and what it might imply for Hawthorne’s own sexuality, at once revealed and concealed in the figure of the faun. Any account of the terrifying instabilities of the Roman carnival needs to be located in the context of a real anxiety produced by the women artists and their rather public performance of their sexuality. Walter Herbert puts the matter cogently: ‘‘The purity of women is a screen upon which Hawthorne projects his anxieties about the virginity that males should retain in relation to other males.’’ 24 Calling the women lesbians may be problematic because we know little of their sex lives. But we do know that they lived together and cared for each other. In many cases, they cross-dressed, perhaps for a combination of professional and personal reasons. (Charlotte Cushman, who performed in trouser roles, retained male clothing for her personal life, whereas animal painter Rosa Bonheur claimed she needed to wear men’s dress for her work—long skirts would hardly do at the abattoir.) Cross-dressing was an important factor of social debate in the 1840s, leading to the women’s rights convention of 1848 and the adoption of the ‘‘bloomer.’’ Although Margaret Fuller did not cross-dress, she did write of a spiritual

and universal androgyny, and her great inspiration George Sand shocked Paris by her cross-dressing. The carnival brought forth in Hawthorne not merely a sense of irritability but indeed disgust and fear mixed with desire. ‘‘There is,’’ he wrote in his notebook in February 1858, ‘‘very little to be said about the spectacle’’ (FIN, 67), although he then proceeded to write a novel about it. Once, he had seen the theater as a space of play of identity; now that anxiety is multiplied as the entire city becomes performance. If he has little to say, he cannot resist using twice his reference to the apples of Sodom, as a sign of a ‘‘fallen’’ nature, a corrupted sugarplum, first in his diary (FIN, 67) and then in The Marble Faun (MF, 439). The play of carnival is a play of the unnatural, indelibly linked to Sodom. By his second carnival, Hawthorne seems to have come to terms with the world of disguise and performance: He himself calls his second carnival ‘‘far more free and riotous’’ (FIN, 499), but the figures he meets will recall for us his accounts of theatricality twenty-five years earlier. We have again the ‘‘men in petticoats’’ and women ‘‘in breeches,’’ even ‘‘a company of young men in flesh-colored tights and chemises, representing a party of girls’’ (FIN, 500). Miriam reveals part of the answer to Hawthorne’s persistent anxiety about gender when she asks Kenyon (to whom many of Hawthorne’s notebook entries have been ascribed), ‘‘‘is he not beautiful?’ . . . watching the sculptor’s eye as it dwelt admiringly on Donatello’’ (MF, 434). Kenyon does not deny the implication of her question; but recognizing what is at stake, a rondo of desires and identities, he answers twice: ‘‘I dare not follow you,’’ ‘‘it is too dangerous.’’ The apparent subject of their conversation is the existence of sin, but that sin will be specified in the following chapter and its reference to Sodom. The language of these concluding chapters is violent and desperate: Rome offers ‘‘wicked filth’’ and ‘‘polluted flowers’’ (MF, 440 – 41). Kenyon’s ‘‘feverish dream’’ allows him to realize the monstrous that lies at the heart of civilization and that, I am arguing, is key to Hawthorne’s imagination from his earliest work. The Marble Faun does not inaugurate those anxieties but provides a sense of their continuing power. The strapping damsels who are read as women by their petticoats but as indeterminate by ‘‘an awful freedom in the flourish of their legs’’ (MF, 445) are the reincarnation of the anxieties of the village theater—the thought that identity is performance. Although the carnival has been conceptualized by Bakhtin in a way that stresses its utopian possibilities, that seems a far from accurate account of the carnival of the nineteenth century, its last gasp before its

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values are internalized. Stallybrass and White, in their important study of transgression,25 argue that the nineteenth-century carnival is used as part of the process of the creation of a middle class, through the rejection of the body, particularly the lower body. From a ceremony of ritual exchange of power, the carnival becomes a spectacle of the corrupted body, from which the middle-class observer is distinguished (indeed derives, like Kenyon, his identity from his refusal to take part in carnival). As the political carnival vanishes, a new psychological carnival emerges as a site of neurosis: the attempt to control the body through the mind. The ego is threatened by a public display of the transgressive id. Kenyon, the observer of the carnival, as Coverdale was in The Blithedale Romance, constitutes the creation of the bourgeois subject. What the carnival reminds us of is the constructedness of all identity, its performance as the very nature of the theatrical, as Joseph Litvak has so brilliantly argued.26 In Foucaultian rather than Bakhtinian terms, the permissions of the carnival are but means toward a greater surveillance, one that works toward a regularization of desire as an essential part of the creation of the new, secure self. Only those who know who they are can return to America; the ambiguous, like the ambivalent, are left to the complexities of Rome, complexities that Hawthorne from the beginning had found both enticing and terrifying. Hawthorne’s texts play an important part in the surveillance of the self that is crucial to the construction of the bourgeois male. His personal anxieties become those of his culture, faced with a terrifying sense of possibility— whether from the Italian revolutions that Margaret Fuller was recording and supporting, from a loss of essentialism in a new biological order, from the threat of slave revolt, or indeed from the multiplicity of sexuality and desire. Whatever the freedom apparently offered by the theatrical, and no matter Hawthorne’s desire to shake off the burdens of identity and history, there is no way to escape time, no text that is not a palimpsest.

notes 1. Terence Martin, ‘‘Hawthorne’s Public Decade and the Values of Home,’’ American Literature 46 (1974), 141–52. 2. T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 258, 269. 3. Nancy Bentley, ‘‘Slaves and Fauns: Hawthorne and the Uses of Primitivism,’’ ELH 57 (1990), 902.

4. Mark A. R. Kemp, ‘‘The Marble Faun and American Postcolonial Ambivalence,’’ Modern Fiction Studies 43 (Spring 1997), 212. 5. Ibid. 6. Robert S. Levine, ‘‘ ‘Antebellum Rome’ in The Marble Faun,’’ American Literary History 2 (1990), 20. 7. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, vol. 14 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 461. Further citations from The Marble Faun appear in the text as MF and are taken from this edition. 8. Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). A literal return to the scene of the crime takes place in ‘‘Roger Malvin’s Burial’’ (1832), a story filled with Oedipal tensions. For Crews, Reuben is a ‘‘patricide.’’ 9. Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘‘Passages from a Relinquished Work,’’ Hawthorne: Selected Tales and Sketches, ed. Michael J. Colacurcio (New York: Penguin, 1987), 74, 76. Further citations appear in the text. 10. Crews, Sins of the Father, 87. 11. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Submission of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 12. James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 78. 13. Personal communication with the author. 14. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, vol. 3 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 195, 193. 15. Bentley, ‘‘Slaves and Fauns,’’ 915. 16. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne: Selected Tales and Sketches, 173. 17. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks, vol. 14 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 173–74. Subsequent citations appear in the text abbreviated FIN. 18. Bentley, ‘‘Slaves and Fauns,’’ 903. 19. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 9. 20. The motif is striking in several later texts, such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Henry James’s ‘‘The Beast in the Jungle.’’ 21. Although the colloquial meaning of ‘‘preposterous’’ has become merely ‘‘silly,’’ dictionaries record its original sexual meaning as ‘‘inverted’’ or ‘‘perverted’’ (American Heritage) or ‘‘contrary to nature’’ (Oxford). Hawthorne plays with the term similarly in The House of the Seven Gables (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), in the episode of the Italian street musician and his monkey. The monkey has ‘‘a thick tail curling out into preposterous prolixity from beneath his tartans’’ (163– 64), in a complex image that reflects the concealed genitals (the tartans evoke the question, what does a Scotsman wear under his kilt?) and the desire to possess in the spectator, but also the sexuali-

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zation of the foreign and particularly the ‘‘dark,’’ which reaches its culmination, or its nadir, in the conjoining of the monkey and the Italian, a figure anticipating the ‘‘racial’’ view of Donatello. 22. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, 491. 23. Ibid., 495. 24. Herbert, Dearest Beloved, 262. 25. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986). 26. Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), xii.

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Kristie Hamilton

fauns and mohicans narratives of extinction and hawthorne’s aesthetic of modernity

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Like the lustre of the dying lamp, their glory shone the brightest as they were about to become extinct. james fenimore cooper, 1826 preface, The Last of the Mohicans

But ah! what once has been shall be no more! / The groaning earth in travail and in pain / Brings forth its races, but does not restore, / And the dead nations never rise again. henry wadsworth longfellow, ‘‘the jewish cemetery at newport’’ [I]t was a pleasant and kindly race of men, but capable of savage fierceness, and never quite restrainable within the trammels of human law. nathaniel hawthorne, ‘‘the pedigree of monte beni,’’ The Marble Faun

In an essay titled ‘‘Paleoart, Or How the Dinosaurs Broke into MoMA,’’ 1 W. J. T. Mitchell recounts the history of the invention of the dinosaur as an imagined cultural object, beginning with Englishman Richard Owen’s coining of the term ‘‘dinosaur’’ in the 1840s and the debut of the dinosaur, in the form of two life-sized sculptures, at London’s Crystal Palace, in 1854— coincidentally the year after Nathaniel Hawthorne began his service as consul in Liverpool. Mitchell argues that the immediate fascination of the public with dinosaurs in the 1840s and 1850s is directly linked to the contemporaneous emergence of cultural practices and institutions now identified with modernity and with the ‘‘birth of modern art’’: He suggests, in short, that the dinosaur, a species early conceived as ‘‘doomed to extinction,’’ proved an ideal figure

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around which to narrate the modern—to tell stories, both terrifying and soothing, of the replacement of a mighty but now obsolete species by a more highly evolved, if less awe-inspiring and more spindly, successor, and to tell stories about art made eminently recognizable as ‘‘new’’ by its juxtaposition with material evidence of what it definitively was not, but might someday become. Mitchell’s findings are but one fertile instance of nineteenth-century European and American interests, varied and entwined, in narratives of extinction. In the United States, ‘‘Indian stories’’ (for example, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok, Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, and Francis Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac) 2 rationalized the displacement of native peoples from their original homelands and justified the pursuit of a Manifest Destiny by fashioning fictional plots in which Indians were described as destined to go the way of antediluvian creatures. As Philip Fisher has explained convincingly, the emphasis in American historical novels of the 1840s on the language of doom, fate, and destiny in the narration of the ‘‘defeat and vanishing’’ of Native Americans was integral to a nationalist project of writing a ‘‘pre-history’’ of an America whose ‘‘victory’’ over Indian nations seemed inevitable, if also often ‘‘stained and guilty.’’ 3 The image of a people teetering on the brink of extinction and of a new ‘‘race’’ emerging to take its place had been useful to American culture earlier and later in the century, in fact, as literary and ethnological texts characterized not only Native Americans but also other ethnic groups that could thereby be held to be outside of mainstream Anglo-American society and even outside of modern history. Three years before the appearance of The Song of Hiawatha (1855), for instance, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published ‘‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’’ a poem that, on its face, celebrates the ‘‘great traditions’’ of the Jews as a people and mourns the long history of their persecution.4 Yet in the final stanza, Longfellow concludes by superimposing the well-established story that Anglo-Americans had told themselves about ‘‘the Indians’’ onto an account of the fate of the Jews: ‘‘But ah! what once has been shall be no more! / The groaning earth in travail and in pain / Brings forth its races, but does not restore, / And the dead nations never rise again (lines 57– 60). In an era of overt antiSemitism in the United States, when writers and artists could with impunity express a racialized prejudice toward Jews, Longfellow’s poem may have seemed an admiring panegyric. As with stories of the noble but vanishing savage, however, his poem articulates as common sense the status of nineteenth-century Jews as mere remnants of a ‘‘race’’ whose demise was making way for the birth of new nations. What be-

comes clear from this example, from the numerous ‘‘Indian stories’’ of the period, and from the early popularity of fossil lore is that, for nineteenth-century Americans—well before the 1860 publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species —the proliferation of extinction narratives was producing a deep cultural logic through which they could understand, as matters of course, the extraordinary changes associated with nationalization and modernization. In what follows, I mean to establish the not-so-submerged presence in Hawthorne’s last complete novel, The Marble Faun, of multiple narratives of extinction and to begin to suggest the ways that the logic and trajectory of these stories attach themselves to Hawthorne’s thinking about art. Hawthorne’s novel has, in fact, an especial significance in American cultural history that becomes apparent within the context of the emergent discourse of ‘‘extinction.’’ By synthesizing narratives heretofore activated in overlapping literary, ethnological, archaeological, and sociopolitical arenas, Hawthorne advocates for a particular interpretation of the evolving history of aesthetics in concert with his selfconsciously pragmatic vision of morality.5 I will argue here that The Marble Faun is Hawthorne’s most fully developed endorsement of an aesthetic of ephemerality embedded within a story that insists on the inevitability, somewhat regrettable but with discernible artistic advantages, of a particular kind of future for Americans— one that we have come to term ‘‘modernity.’’ Making figurative use of early cultural fantasies of reinvigorated fossils, and shaping his allegorical schema in a way most directly comparable to James Fenimore Cooper’s work, Hawthorne adds to the store of new myths that would help produce the idea of the modern.6 In essence, Hawthorne fashions a meditation about the past, present, and future of art within the framework of an ‘‘Indian story’’ transplanted to Rome and its environs. The parallels between Hawthorne’s novel and The Last of the Mohicans argue for a figurative and conceptual similarity between the two fictional projects. Most obviously, Hawthorne’s descriptions of Donatello evoke the nineteenth-century type of the American ‘‘Indian,’’ an imaginary being whose qualities Anglo-Americans projected onto living Native Americans, as, for instance, Hawthorne had done when describing one of his neighbors in an 1838 entry in his Notebook: ‘‘We have another [neighbor] with Indian blood in him, and the straight, black hair— something of the tawny skin and the quick shining eye of the Indian. He seems reserved, but is not ill-natured when spoken to. There is so much of the white in him, that he gives the impression of belonging to a civilized race, which causes the more strange sensation on discovering that he has a wild lineage.’’ 7 In the chapter titled ‘‘The Pedigree of the

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Monte Beni,’’ Hawthorne delineates the character traits that derive from what he terms Donatello’s ‘‘wild paternity’’: Beautiful, strong, brave, kindly, sincere, of honest impulses, and endowed with simple tastes, and the love of homely pleasures, he was believed to possess gifts by which he could associate himself with the wild things of the forest, and with the fowls of the air, and could feel a sympathy even with the trees, among which it was his joy to dwell. On the other hand, there were deficiencies both of intellect and heart, and especially, as it seemed, in the development of the higher portion of man’s nature. . . .8 44

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Because of his ancient lineage, according to the author, Donatello is both primitively innocent and capable of ‘‘savage fierceness’’ (MF, 233– 34). Cooper’s Uncas, like Hawthorne’s rendering of his ‘‘Indian’’ neighbor and like Donatello, is a ‘‘wild associate’’ of whites and, like the other figures, has learned to act in such a way that the Englishman Duncan Heyward can, for a time, ‘‘forget the character and condition’’ of his friend.9 Donatello and Uncas, despite their often heroic characterizations, are made subject to impulses that express their ‘‘character and condition’’ of inherent ‘‘wildness.’’ Thus, both Hawthorne and Cooper fashion figures capable of nobility of an ancient kind who achieve a special sympathy with creatures of the forest, but who, at certain critical moments, remain in the thrall of their animal instincts; that is, they are contained within the conventional antebellum representation of ‘‘Indians’’ described by Eric Sundquist in his discussion of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s six-volume ‘‘study’’ of Native Americans (1851–1857): 10 ‘‘The Indian for Schoolcraft is ‘fallen,’ in a state of decline; he worships nature, not God, and he hunts instead of raising grain and developing industrial arts. Schoolcraft is committed to the theory that the Indian’s degradation is a result of neglecting ‘higher and sublime principles.’’’ 11 Along with many of the characteristics just described, Donatello also shares with Cooper’s Uncas, of course, the lamentable fate of being the last of his line. Both of these leading men are in love with gentlewomen of mixed descent. Miriam is ultimately identified as English and Italian, with, Hawthorne is careful to say, ‘‘a vein . . . of Jewish blood’’ (MF, 429– 30). She is allowed to remain for much of the novel, however, racially ambiguous, associated with numerous legends regarding her racial/ ethnic origins, including the speculation that she might have ‘‘one burning drop of African blood in her veins’’ (MF, 23). Cora is Scottish and Euro–West Indian, and ‘‘descended, remotely’’ from an Afro-

Caribbean slave (LOM, 159). These mixed-race women are characterized as more passionate, hardier, more compelling, and in many ways, more discerning than their paler female counterparts Alice and Hilda, and they inspire immediate and compulsive devotion in their ‘‘wild’’ admirers. Such story lines animate, of course, the American racialist imaginary of the antebellum period that conflates and exoticizes non– Anglo-Saxon racial, ethnic, and national identities in the service of various American national fantasies. These include, as Sundquist notes, ‘‘the loss of innocence that progress entails; a mythic age that would give historical scope to an America eager to assert its nationalism; or a primitivistic stage of social organization preferable to an increasingly urban, industrial world,’’ 12 as well as specific political projects, such as antebellum Indian Removal Policies. For Cooper, the interracial desire and mixing emblematized by the pairing of Cora and Uncas is what is, in the end, to be refused by Americans. In Hawthorne, it is the sign of the too-lengthy history of a civilization that cannot disentangle its good from its savagery.13 In both novels, however, interracial desire is also the crucible for trying individual moral development and cultural cross-fertilization.14 Under the influence of his spontaneous love for Cora, Uncas undergoes a process of moral evolution over the course of the novel, gaining, according to Cooper, ‘‘a sympathy, that elevated him far above the intelligence, and advanced him probably centuries before the practices of his nation’’ (LOM, 115). Also elevated above his ‘‘race’’ after committing a crime of passion for Miriam, Donatello experiences ‘‘remorse [that], gnawing into his soul, has awakened it; developing a thousand high capabilities, moral and intellectual, which we never should have dreamed of asking for, within the scanty compass of the Donatello whom we knew’’ (MF, 460). The challenges facing these characters for the full growth of their sympathies are made great, however, given the ease with which both Uncas and Donatello toss barbarous kinsmen over the edge of precipices. The morally complicating theme of cultural fratricide in Cooper— of ‘‘good Indians’’ killing ‘‘bad Indians’’— emerges, that is, in The Marble Faun as well, for as Evan Carton has reminded us, the Model in Hawthorne’s story is described early as resembling an ‘‘antique Satyr’’ and therefore as being the baser, more grossly sensual ‘‘cousin’’ (MF, 78) of the more innocent faun: 15 ‘‘[A]nd, in truth, the Spectre of the Catacomb might have represented the last survivor of that vanished race, hiding himself in sepulchral gloom, and mourning over his lost life of woods and streams’’ (MF, 30). Indeed, here, and in the heat of the fateful struggle, it might become difficult to differentiate the formerly ‘‘simple and joyous creature’’ Donatello, whose eyes now

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‘‘blazed with fierce energy’’ (MF, 172), from the Model’s own ‘‘wild visage’’ (MF, 30).16 Thus, The Marble Faun also introduces its own counterpart to Cooper’s Magua, creating an ambiguity in classification that collapses both Donatello and the Model into one category of shared ‘‘wild lineage,’’ with the implication, according to Cooper’s mythos and Hawthorne’s figurative schema, that one cousin will soon share the fate of the other as ‘‘last survivor[s]’’ of vanishing races inevitably do.17 In his chapter on Cooper’s The Deerslayer, Fisher describes the material, political consequences of such a ‘‘collapse of categories’’ for the Cherokees of the 1830s. In ‘‘a historical moment in which there were no longer good-Indians and bad-Indians, farming versus hunting, settled versus migratory, Christianized versus ‘wild,’. . . peaceful versus warlike,’’ Jacksonian Indian Removal Policy used the ideological ambiguities that Euro-Americans had themselves created to force all people who could be named ‘‘Indians’’ to move west of the Mississippi.18 By fashioning central characters who are dual in their ‘‘nature’’ and doubled in the plot, Cooper and Hawthorne responded to and collaborated in the nation’s self-rationalizing fantasy of, as Fisher puts it, ‘‘breaking open, reclosing, and carrying away the box of civilization.’’ 19 Readers were allowed, in other words, at once to admire Uncas and Donatello and to accept their vanishing because the acts of heroism that ally them with their more advanced friends simultaneously prove their kinship with their outmoded victims. To punctuate the trajectory of the revivified faun’s story, Hawthorne goes so far as to have Kenyon observe a likeness between Donatello and the ‘‘antediluvian creatures’’ that must ‘‘perish’’ (MF, 459). Within the framework of the narrative of extinction, Donatello serves, then, as a surrogate sinner who can never fully transcend his lineage but who can enable his successors to learn from him without having to come dangerously near the tar pit. In The Last of the Mohicans, as in The Marble Faun, the action, interest, and erotic charge surrounding the darker, less conventional pairs carries much more affective power than that given to the blonder, blander couples, Heyward and Alice, and Kenyon and Hilda. Nonetheless, the Anglo-American, heterosexual twosomes are, in an instrumental sense, the novels’ central characters—the receivers and the carriers of each novel’s wish toward the future. In the mode of reading Shakespearean romance, we know this because both Anglo couples are allowed to leave the world of the novel in the end, bound for a destination where they may try their new knowledge, leaving behind those who are martyred, incriminated, or just plain set in their ways. A significant difference between Cooper and Hawthorne is that the former selects the male, pale character Heyward as the primary student—who must learn the

‘‘law of the woods,’’ how to fight bravely and how to be wary, shrewd, and strong, without compromising his original principles. Hawthorne, on the other hand, makes the woman Hilda the combatant who undergoes the most intensive tutelage from wiser characters and melodramatic events. Although both Cooper’s Alice and Hawthorne’s Kenyon are cut loose from their cultural moorings as well, the training of neither of these characters is as disciplined or sustained as that of their future mate and ‘‘protector.’’ When seen in the light of an allegory of extinction and succession, and especially when set in comparison with Cooper’s novel, The Marble Faun’s investment in Hilda and Kenyon invites scrutiny, and Hawthorne’s complex designs on the conventional ‘‘bland, ordinary hero[es]’’ of the historical novel become more resonant.20 In Hilda’s case, he engages two major problems inherent in his culture’s idealizing of womanhood in the image of youthful feminine purity. First, although a ‘‘true woman’’ such as Cooper’s Alice may be fetchingly naı¨ve, she is nonetheless hindered in her capacity for perceptiveness by ignorance of human complexity. Second, the cultural injunction that ideally a woman must be the best advocate and embodiment of ‘‘purity’’ itself (with its multiple and mobile applications) actually leaves her little safe leeway in her selforganization for compassionating with the ‘‘impure,’’ pace her supposed constituent altruism. Hawthorne addresses these hindrances generated by the ideal type by having Hilda witness a crime that is ‘‘her first actual discovery that sin is in the world. The young and pure are not apt to find out that miserable truth, until it is brought home to them by the guiltiness of some trusted friend’’ (MF, 204). After the murder of the Model, Hilda can no longer understand ‘‘evil’’ through an ‘‘impalpable theory’’ (MF, 204). Likened now, as Miriam had been, to Beatrice Cenci, Hilda has an ‘‘intimate consciousness of . . . sin’’ (MF, 205) that causes ‘‘the substance, the truth, the integrity of life, the motives of effort, the joy of success, [to] depart’’ (MF, 206). This crisis is not only moral, of course, but also emotional, practical, and indeed epistemological; Hawthorne destabilizes Hilda’s certainty about what is true, her sense of how to feel about what she ‘‘knows,’’ and her ability to determine how to act. In effect, he sets in motion a transformation of Hilda into a modern subject who must eventually gain, with Miriam as model and cause, a more ‘‘mobile imagination’’ (MF, 78). Although she may seem too little changed at the conclusion of the novel for our taste, especially when compared with the dynamic Miriam, in fact, Hawthorne takes care to suggest that his pragmatically refashioned, but still idealized, ‘‘daughter of the Puritans’’ (MF, 326) had been brought to an ‘‘intimate’’ way of knowing that ‘‘sin’’ or crime palpably exists and that

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this ‘‘consciousness’’ had become a permanent element of her being (MF, 205). In a crucial scene, soon after she has relieved herself of her burden of silence through secular confession, the narrator provides an elaborate explanation of the way Hilda must manage her new understanding:

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Hilda (as is sometimes the case with persons whose delicate organization requires a peculiar safeguard) had an elastic faculty of throwing off such recollections as would be too painful for endurance. The first shock of Donatello’s and Miriam’s crime had, indeed, broken through the frail defence of this voluntary forgetfulness; but, once enabled to relieve herself of the ponderous anguish over which she had so long brooded, she practised a subtile watchfulness in preventing its return. (MF, 382)

Kristie Hamilton

Although Hawthorne seems to be reeling her back to her too-ideal maidenly ways of coping, this description is actually tellingly complicated. Hilda’s capacity to ‘‘throw off’’ what she knows is represented as an act of will— decidedly not a loss of memory, but rather the ‘‘subtile’’ choice to forget. Were she to choose instead to admit her ‘‘painful knowledge,’’ it would immediately reemerge. And reemerge it does, at least four times in the last nine chapters of the novel.21 Hilda, in fact, has only limited control over her shadow knowledge, which explains the sharply declarative tone of disavowal with which she first greets Kenyon’s consideration of moral and philosophical ambiguity. Fashioning a female protagonist who can never admit heroism in the actions of criminals, Hawthorne preserves Hilda’s ‘‘crystal clear medium of her own integrity’’ by showing the way she can create a space of difference between consciousness and ‘‘understanding’’ (MF, 384). To Kenyon’s verdict that Donatello and Miriam are ‘‘Worthy of Death, but not Unworthy of Love,’’ Hilda responds: This thing, as regards its causes, is all a mystery to me, and must remain so. . . . I do not understand (and may God keep me from ever understanding) how two things so totally unlike can be mistaken for one another; nor how two mortal foes—as Right and Wrong surely are— can work together in the same deed. This is my faith; and I should be led astray, if you could persuade me to give it up. (MF, 384)

What Hilda does not say in this passage is that Right and Wrong can never be mistaken for each other. Nor does she say that the ‘‘mystery’’

cannot be understood. Rather, she enjoins Kenyon not to explain away a faith she chooses, in the face of contradictory evidence. Through an act of will and persuasion, Hilda makes ‘‘integrity’’ possible, an integrity that acts not as truth but as a woman-made rudder in the travels, travails, and work of both characters. It is also in this scene that Hawthorne completes Hilda’s transformation by having her acknowledge and act upon her latent compassion. The effect of Kenyon’s understandable, but faulty, assertion that she ‘‘need[s] no mercy, and therefore know[s] not how to show any’’ is to ‘‘set ajar’’ the ‘‘prison-door’’ of Hilda’s memory, allowing ‘‘a throng of torturing recollections to escape from their dungeons into the pure air and white radiance of her soul’’ (MF, 385). The ‘‘painful doubt’’ unleashed, far from being debilitating as was initially the case, enables her to act on the ‘‘real tie’’ she has with Miriam—to know herself to be ‘‘guilty toward her friend’’ (MF, 386) and therefore to act with love toward one in whom she knows the ‘‘dreadful mixture of good and evil’’ to exist (MF, 384).22 Hilda’s new skills of feeling affection for a person afflicted with the ‘‘dreadful mixture’’ and of acting on her empathy— even unto traveling through ‘‘the foulest and ugliest part of Rome’’ (MF, 387)—while preserving her integrity are learned through her relationship with a mixedrace European woman. Her expanded capacities could, however, come in very handy in her future intimate dealings with her American artist man, who may from time to time be tempted himself to peep, if not leap, into the ‘‘dreadful blackness’’ of the abyss. It is, after all, in conversation with Kenyon, when he articulates radical ideas that he might better imply in sculpture (in, say, an unfinished bust of Donatello), that her knowledge of sin is first usefully recalled. G. M. Goshgarian’s provocative explanation of the mid-century woman’s role as the one who must know and yet not know all that her son/husband might fall prey to in the way of vices, in order to ‘‘preserv[e] manly purity,’’ sheds light on Hilda’s tenacious refusal to admit theories of fortunate falls and the like.23 She knows more immediately and sensuously than does Kenyon of what complicated materials and conditions crime, guilt, and sorrow are made. Nevertheless, Hilda’s job, at the conclusion of The Marble Faun, is to fend off distracting desires and knowledge and to create an atmosphere within which her man can flex his imagination and remain productive while avoiding, as far as is humanly possible, slipping into the grip of the ‘‘criminal.’’ 24 For his part, Kenyon has learned to yearn for a woman whose ‘‘Maidenhood’’ will, like ‘‘Snow-drops’’ (the subject of his latest sculpture), soon melt into another form, when, as he warmly fantasizes, he makes

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‘‘her sensible of a wider freedom’’(MF, 395). That there is ‘‘something dearer to Kenyon than his art’’ (MF, 424), in light of the many male protagonists who are subjected to criticism in Hawthorne for failing to see, feel, or value anything outside their career or ego, is an important component of Hawthorne’s figuring of a male artist who might not botch the future.25 What Hawthorne describes is not a conventional sentimental nor a passionately romantic conception of heterosexual coupling, to say the least. It is a somewhat uncomfortable and ill-fitting, but oddly compatible, dialogical partnership in which neither partner knows enough to survive without the other, neither is fully at liberty, and both ‘‘must’’ choose, strategically, when to admit and when to stand at a distance from what shadows their consciousness, if not their conscience. It is, in other words, what T. Walter Herbert has arrestingly brought to our recollection in Dearest Beloved, a working model of the nineteenth-century middle-class family.26 Like the deaths of Uncas and Cora, their union imaginable now only in the ‘‘blessed hunting grounds of the Lenape’’ (LOM, 343), the life sentence of separate penitence uniting Miriam and Donatello clears the way for the succession of a new civilization. Hawthorne is partly but not solely reproducing the national historical romance, which justifies uneasily, as Fisher has argued, the succession of an ancient, waning civilization by a ‘‘new race’’ of men and women, who would be the Americans.27 That story, revised by Hawthorne, would go something like this. In Italy, as increasingly in the United States at mid-century, it was in the city—not in the forest—where ‘‘dark’’ and dangerous figures were believed to lurk, and Americans must learn the laws of city streets to avoid their threatening seductions. In Rome, two naı¨ve AngloAmericans are initiated into navigation and survival with the help of Europeans of noble, though mixed, heritage, who are either more knowing or more ‘‘savage’’ ‘‘natives’’ of the cosmopolitan. When Hilda and Kenyon emerge from their journey through the unhomelike,28 they are less fragile and idealistic, and more knowing—although their knowledge, imaged in an Etruscan bracelet, is preserved under the veil of ‘‘voluntary forgetfulness’’ (MF, 382). At last, this paler, less passionate, but now ‘‘sturdier’’ couple (MF, 375) are prepared to turn their steps toward their manifest, if not untroubled, destiny. The Marble Faun is not, however, only an urban ‘‘Indian story’’; Hawthorne’s novel is also through and through about art. Within a conceptual schema that allies readers with the young Americans while it

elegizes European culture as ‘‘Not Unworthy of Love,’’ Hawthorne plots an embedded and parallel narrative about the waning power of older aesthetics and their replacement by an emergent aesthetic and newer forms. In effect, the accumulated history of European art, the paintings and sculpture that surround one in Rome, had become, like the ‘‘bedimmed’’ church walls in a ‘‘fossilized town,’’ the ‘‘pathetic relics’’ of what had once been glorious (MF, 303). By the conclusion of the novel, for both American protagonists, classic ‘‘Art had lost its consecration’’ (MF, 341). In this accounting of aesthetics, Kenyon and Hilda begin as talented artists but are tied, each in his or her own way, to the conventions and values of the Old Masters. By the end of the novel, having suffered significant but indirect effects of their European friends’ trials and having learned something more of compassion and loss as a result, both American artists begin to see with new eyes and create differently.29 I now turn to the character of this new aesthetic. In a number of his earlier short works, and in the prefaces to his tales and sketches, Hawthorne had developed a consistent and increasingly assured line of thought that it was in the ephemeral—in the evanescence that characterized the ‘‘new reality’’ of the mid-nineteenth century—that meaningfulness now resided. Let me cite here one such instance of Hawthorne’s early revaluation of modern forms, taken from ‘‘The Old Manse,’’ where he argues that his predecessor’s library is filled with thick volumes of ‘‘dead trumpery’’: Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap, except what had been written for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea of permanence. . . . [The austere divine and his brethren] had been able to produce nothing half so real, as . . . newspaper scribblers . . . had thrown off, in the effervescence of a moment. . . . It is the Age itself that writes newspapers and almanacs . . . whereas most other works being written by men who in the very act, set themselves apart from their age—are likely to possess little significance when new, and none at all, when old.30

In this passage, Hawthorne approvingly identifies the ‘‘more ephemeral writer’’ as having the capacity for ‘‘reproducing’’ the immediacy of an era (Mosses, 21). He confers the authority of ‘‘the Age’’ not only on newspapers and almanacs but also on his own seemingly humble offering of what he calls ‘‘fitful sketches’’ in Mosses from an Old Manse (Mosses, 34). In Hawthorne’s age, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Jonathan Crary, and

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others have shown, the advent of railway travel, new visual technologies, and the emerging dominance of urban culture redefined Americans’ perception of life as having gained new momentum, divided now into mere moments. Writers such as Hawthorne felt the need of and even discovered the pleasure in fashioning literature that could keep pace with the change, despite their inevitable mixed feelings about the permanence they might be forfeiting in the process. It was no accident that in Rome (old, new, and urban) Hawthorne was pressed to struggle again with these unsettling conclusions. Surrounded by architecture, art, and beliefs older than the Puritans, both crumbling and beautiful, inspiring and worn, Hawthorne addresses questions in his journals and his novel about the relative force, effects, and value of different forms and modes of art. For instance, he has the narrator of The Marble Faun articulate, with the eloquence of certainty, the differences between the pictorial sketch and a ‘‘finished picture’’: There is an effluence of divinity in the first sketch, and there, if anywhere, you find the pure light of inspiration, which the subsequent toil of the artist serves to bring out in stronger lustre, indeed, but likewise adulterates it with what belongs to an inferiour mood. The aroma and fragrance of new thought were perceptible in these designs, after three centuries of wear and tear. The charm lay partly in their very imperfection; for this is suggestive, and sets the imagination to work; whereas the finished picture, if a good one, leaves the spectator nothing to do and if bad, confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him. (MF, 138)

Hawthorne clearly perceived the aesthetic opportunities and effects offered by the sketch (visual and, I have suggested elsewhere, literary) to be distinct from those of other genres. Whereas it might be assumed to be a lesser form, Hawthorne finds in the sketch superior powers. It offered meaning or thought that, if less polished or complete, was also less ‘‘adulterated’’ by the artistic process. It did not foreclose interpretive possibilities as did ‘‘the finished picture.’’ Indeed, Hawthorne here endows the sketch with a unique sort of permanence—an unlookedfor kind of ‘‘divinity’’— emanating from its near paradoxical ability to resist the ‘‘wear and tear’’ even of centuries. For him, the sketch retained the power to evoke, over time, a sensuous apprehension of the ‘‘new thought’’ present at its inception and inherent in its design.31 This passage is one of the earliest of many in The Marble Faun in which Hawthorne fashions a rationale for the preeminent expression and the better

sort of permanence to be found in aesthetic forms and qualities associated with the ‘‘new.’’ Hawthorne had, of course, long been a writer of literary sketches, a genre produced by a new literary marketplace, associated for good and ill with the age of mechanical reproduction, with rapid composition and consumption, and expressive, in form and content, of the reading public’s new taste for the ephemeral. It should not be surprising, then, that he locates divinity in effluence and special aesthetic power in the first, not the final, draft; in the clay rather than the marble. Early in the novel, for instance, an uninitiated Kenyon asserts that ‘‘[f]litting moments—imminent emergencies—imperceptible intervals between two breaths— ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of marble; in any sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill,’’ an attitude that the wiser Miriam describes skeptically as the belief ‘‘that sculpture should be a sort of fossilizing process’’ (MF, 16). Yet after being separated from and reunited with Hilda and, in the meantime, having learned to care for Donatello and to savor such ephemeral pleasures as Sunshine wine—the first sip of which is subtly exquisite, the last already turning sour (MF, 223)—Kenyon’s ‘‘genius’’ becomes, according to Hawthorne, ‘‘more delicate than heretofore’’ (MF, 374). He now also recognizes the value of ‘‘fragile creations which are true only to the moment that produces them, and are wronged, if we try to imprison their airy excellence in a permanent material’’ (MF, 375). On similar grounds, Hawthorne even manages to make the copy truer than the original: ‘‘Hilda’s [copies] had that evanescent and ethereal life— that flitting fragrance as it were of the originals—which is difficult to catch and retain. . . . [S]he had been enabled to execute what the great Master had conceived in his imagination, but had not so perfectly succeeded in putting on canvas’’ (MF, 58). The capacity to perceive and capture an evanescent aura is clearly a skill nineteenth-century artists are especially well-suited for. Rome calls out in Hawthorne, that is, a defense of the new, of the sketch, and of the modern. Although he cannot deny the power of antiquity, the Church, the ‘‘finished picture,’’ or marbled permanence, Hawthorne repeatedly puts forward the evanescent and a sensuous immediacy as the qualities that invigorate the majesty of old institutions and poeticize newer forms. Of the market in Perugia he writes: The life of the flitting moment, existing in the antique shell of an age gone by, has a fascination which we do not find in either the past or present, taken by themselves. It might seem irreverent to make the

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gray Cathedral and the tall, time-worn palaces echo back the exuberant vociferation of the market; but they did so, and caused the sound to assume a kind of poetic rhythm, and themselves looked only the more majestic for their condescension. (MF, 312)

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Likewise, the ‘‘unfinished’’ and ‘‘imperfect’’ bust of Donatello captures his ‘‘Soul’s growth’’ best because the emphasis is allowed to remain upon revivifying change within another sort of ‘‘antique shell’’—upon ‘‘the spirit . . . kindling up these imperfect features, like a lambent flame’’ within a ‘‘fossil countenance’’ (MF, 380). To appreciate this rough, new aesthetic dynamism, Hilda describes ‘‘a class of spectators whose sympathy will help them to see the Perfect through a mist of imperfection. Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness’’ (MF, 379). By valuing immediacy, the fragmentary, suggestion, and the unfinished picture or sculpture or novel (!), Hawthorne fashions a rationale for an aesthetic of modernity that not only can compete with but surpass— by reenlivening—history and tradition. Such an aesthetic would eschew ‘‘those minute elucidations, which are so tedious, and after all, so unsatisfactory, in clearing up the romantic mysteries of a story’’ (MF, 455), as Hawthorne’s narrator asserts in the novel’s original conclusion. Indeed, the modern mode of inferential spectatorship repeatedly posited in the novel would be able to perceive fully what might remain only partially elaborated precisely because the new ‘‘experience of even the most ordinary life is full of events that never explain themselves’’ (MF, 455). Through the contrast established between Miriam and Donatello and Hilda and Kenyon, the novel as a whole also suggests that there is a price to be paid for modernity: the loss of the kind of ‘‘fiery life’’ (MF, 377) and joy of which the former couple alone are fully capable. For the latter pair, banal seriousness and internal discipline seem necessary moorings in a systematically unpredictable time. The ‘‘sadly serious’’ business and busy-ness of modern life, as Hawthorne has Kenyon see it (MF, 459), makes ironic sense of the author’s valuing of art, whether written or visual, that focuses on seizing temporary pleasures and moments of deeper meaning because stolen intervals between sorrows may be all that time allows. Hawthorne’s narrative of extinction— of inevitable and unforeseen vanishing—serves, therefore, to magnify the pleasure and legitimacy of an aesthetic of the ephemeral. In the conclusion(s) of his novel, Hawthorne leaves Miriam first a wandering penitent and then resident of a convent and Donatello, the

last of the Monte Beni, an imprisoned killer. Miriam both ‘‘blesses’’ and ‘‘repels’’ the Anglo-American couple, warning them from the ‘‘fathomless abyss’’ that separates the now adulterated Europeans from the Americans (MF, 461). These characters have served the American artists well, providing them with a legacy of dark wisdom, tolerance, and training in meeting ‘‘the Unexpected.’’ This last preeminent facet of modernity, notably rendered by Hawthorne in capital letters, can shatter into ‘‘fragments,’’ as he puts it, any ‘‘iron frame-work, such as we fancy may compel the future to take one inevitable shape’’ (MF, 289). Unlike Cooper, Hawthorne allows his dark-haired, more compelling, mixed-race characters to live, but he leaves them incapable of reproduction. Kenyon and Hilda, however, can no longer afford to ‘‘defer the reality of life, . . . until a future moment’’ (MF, 461). Having become ‘‘new creatures’’ (MF, 365) who carry with them the memory of the ‘‘fossil countenance[s]’’ of Donatello and Miriam (MF, 377 and 380),32 Hilda and Kenyon must set off for a different home before it comes to pass that ‘‘there are no future moments . . . and the native air has lost its invigorating quality’’ (MF, 461). Leaving living fossils behind, these two artists will return to a modern life parceled out in ‘‘flitting moments—imminent emergencies—imperceptible intervals between two breaths.’’ And this life will require not a ‘‘frozen art’’ but rather an art that can capture the divinity still present in ‘‘brief snatches of time’’ (MF, 16). Hawthorne’s Rome, like fauns and Mohicans, has given the modern a reason to be.

notes 1. Paper presented at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, February 1998. See also Mitchell’s The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially chaps. 11, 12, 13, and 18 and Coda. 2. Nina Baym, ‘‘Putting Women in Their Place: The Last of the Mohicans and Other Indian Stories,’’ in Feminism and American Literary History: Essays (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 19–35. I use Baym’s naming of this genre because it allows the inclusion not only of what were called ‘‘Indian novels’’ but also of other literary forms in which the narrative of ‘‘vanishing Indians’’ was told, e.g., narrative and lyric poetry, sketches (such as Irving’s ‘‘Traits of Indian Character’’ and ‘‘Philip of Pokanoket’’), and tales (such as Harriet P. Spofford’s ‘‘Circumstance’’). Lora Romero and others have counted approximately forty ‘‘Indian novels’’ published between 1824 and 1834 (Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997], 35).

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3. Philip Fisher, Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 25–27. See also Eric J. Sundquist, ‘‘The Indian Gallery: Antebellum Literature and the Containment of the American Indian,’’ in American Literature, Culture, and Ideology: Essays in Memory of Henry Nash Smith, ed. Beverly R. Voloshin (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 37–70; Romero, Home Fronts, 35–51; Baym, ‘‘Putting Women in Their Place,’’ 19– 35; Nina Baym, ‘‘Imaginary Histories,’’ in American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790 –1860 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 152–85. 4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’’ in The Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Household edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin; Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1882), 216–17, line 51. Subsequent references to this work will be to this edition. 5. This essay will focus more intently on the role of Kenyon and Hilda as joint protagonists of The Marble Faun than has been the case in recent prevailing assessments of the novel. For accounts that are representative of the most compelling recent work, see Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 36– 45; Evan Carton, The Marble Faun: Hawthorne’s Transformations (New York: Twayne, 1992); Richard H. Brodhead, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (New York: Penguin, 1990), ix–xxxii; Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989); Richard Millington, Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992); Leland S. Person, Jr., Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). 6. For other critical work that bears upon Hawthorne’s fictional treatment of modernity, see especially Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robert H. Byer, ‘‘Words, Monuments, Beholders: The Visual Arts in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun,’’ in American Iconology: New Approaches to NineteenthCentury Art and Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 163–85; Carton, The Marble Faun; Cathy N. Davidson, ‘‘Photographs of the Dead: Sherman, Daguerre, Hawthorne,’’ Atlantic Monthly 89 (1990): 667–701; Kristie Hamilton, ‘‘Pretexts for Modernity: Everyday Inventions,’’ in America’s Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1998), 132– 49; Frank Kermode, ‘‘Hawthorne’s Modernity,’’ Partisan Review 41 (1974): 428– 41; Robert K. Martin, ‘‘Hester Prynne C’est Moi: Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Anxieties of Gender,’’ in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990), 122–39; Joel Pfister, The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); Alan Trachtenberg, ‘‘Seeing and Believing: Hawthorne’s Reflections on the Daguerreotype in The House of Seven Gables,’’ American Literary History 9 : 3 (1997): 460 –81.

7. Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks, Riverside edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), 172. 8. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: Or, the Romance of Monte Beni, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and L. Neal Smith, vol. 4, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 234. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text, will refer to this edition, and will be abbreviated MF. 9. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 73. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text, will refer to this edition, and will be abbreviated LOM. 10. Sundquist quotes Schoolcraft’s Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States (Sundquist, ‘‘The Indian Gallery,’’ 45). 11. Sundquist, ‘‘The Indian Gallery,’’ 47. 12. Ibid., 39. 13. This despite Hawthorne’s narrator’s assertion, when discussing Miriam’s tragic history, of the antebellum antiaristocratic notion that ‘‘close-kept breeds of men’’ develop insanity in their lines ‘‘when long unmixed with newer blood’’ (MF, 431). 14. See Jane Tompkins, ‘‘No Apologies for the Iroquois,’’ in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790 –1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 94–121, on the theme of cultural cross-fertilization in Cooper’s novel. 15. Carton, The Marble Faun, 102– 4. 16. Although I do not think it is necessary to suggest that Hawthorne was reading Cooper while composing his novel, there is a striking similarity between the description of Magua’s actual physical fall to annihilation and the Model’s quivering descent to silence. As Lora Romero has put it, ‘‘[T]he frequency with which Cooper’s Indians plunge to their deaths from great heights is positively dumbfounding’’ (Romero, Home Fronts, 35). I believe that Hawthorne’s evocation of this image tells us just how firmly embedded an impression the earlier author had made. 17. Nancy Bentley describes such instances in Hawthorne of determining indeterminacy ascribed to race, species, and ethnic culture as his ‘‘complex romancing of race’’—that is, the loosening of race from stable referents of origins (genealogical and physical or cultural) or character (moral and spiritual). Race becomes, then, an active, ever-present element of the story’s ‘‘mystery,’’ yet Hawthorne leaves strategically unsettled, according to Bentley, the questions about its relative import, except as a suggestive signifier of something ‘‘other’’ and as fruitful material for metaphor in his fictive romance and in the nation’s imaginary (Bentley, Ethnography of Manners, 36– 45). It is not the aim of this essay to retrace the ground so amply mapped by Bentley concerning race and primitivism in Hawthorne’s novel and nineteenth-century culture. Her examination of ethnographic texts and racialist theories of the period pro-

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vides further illuminating context for thinking about the narratives of extinction after which Hawthorne elected to pattern his novel. Evan Carton’s earlier and ground-breaking uncovering of Donatello and Miriam’s ‘‘mystery and ambiguity . . . [as] matters of racial identity’’ leads him to conclude, from an angle different from that of Bentley, that ‘‘[t]he partial repression of the racial theme in the novel finally is representative of Hawthorne’s response to the many challenges that presented themselves in Europe [to] . . . the established principles of his identity’’ (Carton, The Marble Faun, 113, 120). 18. Fisher, Hard Facts, 37. 19. Ibid., 61. 20. Ibid., 69. 21. See MF, 385, 459, 462, 466, for examples of the continuity of reference to Hilda’s spontaneous recollection. 22. Gordon Hutner also sees Hilda’s maturation in the novel as central to its project and captures the process I have been tracing in his pithy assessment of her: ‘‘Hilda’s transformation from self-righteous prudishness to prudent righteousness directly results from her growing understanding of her participation in others’ guilt’’ (Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy, 179, 180 –83). 23. G. M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 63– 64. 24. In ‘‘The Facts of Life in the 1850s,’’ Goshgarian describes masturbation as an exemplary threat and ‘‘incest’’ as the model in principle for middle-class family cohesion, drawing upon conduct manuals and medical texts as evidence. The explanation of a mother/wife’s ‘‘passion(lessness)’’ is disturbingly suggestive, and although Goshgarian implies strongly that these insights apply to the women-authored fiction of the day, I find them equally useful in reading maleauthored texts (Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod, 43–79). 25. I am indebted to Leland Person’s chapter ‘‘Dazzling Male Discourse’’ for its comparison of Kenyon with Hawthorne’s artists and scientists who succumbed to the Pygmalion myth (Person, Aesthetic Headaches, 166). Person sees Kenyon ultimately as belonging among these cool and self-hardened characters. I am emphasizing the interaction between a more active Hilda and a less driven, more receptive Kenyon to argue that Hawthorne has a wish toward implying a measured amount of erotic heat that joins and enlivens the pair, even though it is certainly a different erotic from that between Miriam and Donatello or even Donatello and Kenyon. 26. T. Walter Herbert, Jr., Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 27. Fisher, Hard Facts, 22–86. 28. Carton, The Marble Faun, 99–110. 29. The new mode of creativity in Hilda is described in her proposal of ‘‘a mystic story, or parable, or seven-branched allegory’’ (MF, 371). Although she says she will ‘‘go home . . . [and] suggest it to one of our poets,’’ the narrator tells us she ‘‘took childlike pleasure in her own idea’’ (MF, 371). For all that

this implies that she will not write the story herself, it marks a change from the early question posed by the narrator in justifying her role as copyist: ‘‘Would it have been worth Hilda’s while to relinquish this office, for the sake of giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart, in picture, of so many feminine achievements in literature!’’ (MF, 61). Hawthorne, author of ‘‘The Snow-Image,’’ seems to be deciding by the close of the novel that Hilda’s own ‘‘original’’ ideas of these kinds might be worth her (or ‘‘his’’) while. 30. Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse, ed. Fredson Bowers, L. Neal Smith, John Manning, and J. Donald Crowley, vol. 10, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 20 –21. Subsequent references to this work will be cited in the text, will refer to this edition, and will be abbreviated Mosses. 31. My remarks on Hawthorne’s conception of the sketch in ‘‘The Old Manse’’ and The Marble Faun are derived from my earlier discussions of these works in a different context (Hamilton, America’s Sketchbook, 3– 4, 136, respectively). 32. Hawthorne establishes a chain of association that first links Miriam with the statue of Cleopatra and then links the statue, in near-finished form, back to Miriam, describing it as ‘‘the fossil woman of an age that produced statelier, stronger, and more passionate creatures, than our own’’ (MF, 377). With this passage, he draws the story of these characters together with his story about art. Finally, on page 380, he reiterates the connection in his description of the bust of Donatello.

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the purloined studio the woman sculptor as phallic ghost in hawthorne’s The Marble Faun

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During the preparation of The Marble Faun in Rome, Nathaniel Hawthorne made lengthy visits to the sculpture studios of Harriet Hosmer and Louisa Lander and recorded his impressions in his diaries as research material. The Hawthornes mixed socially with Hosmer and the large community of expatriate women artists in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century, but Nathaniel also had ample occasion to observe Lander at work as he sat for her for his portrait bust. The woman artist would have been a familiar figure at home for Hawthorne as well because his wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, was both a painter and a sculptor. She had supported the Hawthornes by her painting—primarily working as a copyist of old masterpieces for American clients—at times when Nathaniel’s work as a writer was unable to pay the family’s bills. Of the two, Sophia was far more interested in the artistic sights of Rome and was Nathaniel’s primary goad and guide to experiencing the museums and artworks of the city. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, The Marble Faun is deeply informed by the author’s experience of women artists’ creativity, interest in art, and the spaces of their work and works. As semifictive, ‘‘mythological travellers’ tales,’’ the journeys to the artists’ studios in The Marble Faun are able to evoke ‘‘real’’ ‘‘psychological experiences, identity transformation, artistic processes and works, aesthetic experiences and patterns of cognition.’’ 1 Hawthorne’s narratives of the studio become sites of intersection between feminine creativity and nineteenth-century cultural discourses on gender and race, where these discourses both encounter the Woman artist as limit in phallic discourse and point beyond that limit along the trajectory of feminine desire.2 Rereading these texts today with our ‘‘erotic antennae’’ tuned for the grains of matrixial sym-

bolic activity, we can track clues about nineteenth-century feminine creativity from Hawthorne’s story of race and gender, exile and expatriation in the in-between spaces of femininity and creativity of the artist’s studio. The Marble Faun includes three visits to artists’ studios. Two of those studios belong to women artists, both of them painters, and the third to the male sculptor Kenyon— or so it seems from the evidence in the text. But when we read Hawthorne’s novel as a detective might, taking its desire literally, it becomes increasingly clear that this is a text shadowed by the all-too-present absence of the Woman sculptor. Like Hamlet’s father, the Woman sculptor assumes the figure of a phallic ghost who haunts Hawthorne’s narrative, speaking only of desire, and whose absence returns with the insistence of the inadequately repressed.3 To arrive at the studios visited in Hawthorne’s novel, his narratives take us on the long journey through the dark and dirty lanes of the foreigners’ and artists’ quarter of pre-Risorgimento Rome. The neighborhood is described; the door to the palazzo in which the artist lives is pictured down to its frayed rope door latch; and the courtyard, stairwell, and antechambers and their contents are enumerated. Following the guidebook formula of the period, Hawthorne’s narratives describe every topographical feature passed on the way to the studio in careful detail, savoring the anticipation and postponing our arrival. But finally, in the visit to Kenyon’s studio, we come face to face with the sculptor. There are no more thresholds to cross, no more limits to overcome; we have come—to the end. When Kenyon casts off the veil that covers his work of sculpture, we will have reached the goal: the sculptural object. Or rather, we will merely have arrived at another sort of limit, one that cannot be overcome, even by all the skillful writing and rhetorical power at the author’s command. Hawthorne speaks of just such an unthinkable, untraversible limit in the preface to the novel, where he confesses that the fictional sculptor’s works have been pilfered from the studios of Rome. He names the artists and artworks he has borrowed for his narrative, concluding by confessing that Having imagined a sculptor, in this Romance, it was necessary to provide him with such works in marble as should be in keeping with the artistic ability which he was supposed to possess. With this view, the Author laid felonious hands upon a certain bust of Milton and a statue of a Pearl-Diver, which he found in the studio of Mr. Paul Akers, and secretly conveyed them to the premises of his imaginary friend, in the

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Via Frezza. Not content even with these spoils, he committed a further robbery upon a magnificent statue of Cleopatra, the production of Mr. William W. Story, an artist whom his country will not long fail to appreciate. He had thoughts of appropriating, likewise, a certain door of bronze, by Mr. Randolph Rogers, representing the history of Columbus in a series of admirable bas-reliefs, but was deterred by an unwillingness to meddle with public property. Were he capable of stealing from a lady, he would certainly have made free with Miss Hosmer’s noble statue of Zenobia.4

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Thus Hawthorne’s preface evokes a crime scene—a scene where crimes have both been committed and from which they have been abstained because they would require the breach of unthinkable limits: meddling with public property, stealing from a lady. The work of art is constituted by a series of limits that are posited, defended, played with, and transgressed. Limits between the art object and other sorts of objects, between artist and audience, between signifier and signified, for example, define what is ‘‘art’’ in any given moment. Similarly, every crime is made possible only by the precondition of a limit. How, without a law, a limit, asks Joan Copjec, ‘‘is crime possible? How is it possible to transgress territories that have no private boundaries, to steal something that belongs to no one?’’ 5 By reading the sculptor’s studio in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun through Copjec’s analysis of structures of desire in classic film noir detective fiction, I propose to investigate this novel as a crime scene in order to track the phallic ghost of the Woman sculptor that haunts its narrative (RMD, 169). The Marble Faun is in fact a novel constructed around a crime; we can read it as a sort of detective novel or game of Clue, in which the mystery is not just around who committed the crime but also who the victim was, and even what the weapon and crime were. In fact, I shall argue that the reason why the ostensible murder in The Marble Faun remains largely arcane, even after Hawthorne’s allegedly explanatory postscript, is that the murder committed by Miriam and Donatello on the Tarpeian Rock masks the novel’s other, far more central crime—a crime whose identity is even more obscure, whose presence is even more ghostlike, than that of the ambivalent artist’s Model/monk who is both persecutor and victim in The Marble Faun. This hidden crime, The Marble Faun’s purloined letter, is equally a crime of passion, a crime of desire. The reason why this crime has so far not been discovered by the usual literary investigators is that they ‘‘busy themselves with the senseless task of ignoring desire and taking the evidence literally, conflating signifiers and signifieds’’(RMD, 169). We

are all familiar with the standard detective narrative: The evidence is all there, the police have it all, and yet they still fail to see the clues that point to the criminal. When the detective intervenes and reveals everything in the final analysis of the crime, we think, ‘‘Oh, yes, it was there all the time, obvious and yet I didn’t see it.’’ It took the intervention of the detective’s interpretation to find the purloined letter, to solve the mystery: ‘‘interpretation that, Lacan says, is desire’’ (RMD, 169). Desire, explains Copjec, ‘‘is not an impurity that threatens the ‘objectivity’ of the detective, but the quasi-transcendental principle that guarantees it’’ (RMD, 169). Because the detective knows how to take her/his own desire literally, s/he is able to ‘‘read between the lines,’’ to recognize ‘‘a gap, a distance, between the evidence and that which the evidence establishes . . . the principle by which the trail [of clues] attaches itself to the criminal’’ (RMD, 177). As ‘‘desiring detectives,’’ in order to discover the crime, we must ‘‘take the culprit’s desire literally,’’ learn to read the space between the evidence and the criminal’s desire, ‘‘seeing the way it manifests itself in the clues’’ (RMD, 177), rather than becoming blinded by the textual evidence. The difference between the police and the detective therefore lies in how they read space. The police see the locked room in which the corpse has impossibly appeared as a finite and bounded space. The crime becomes impossible for the police without the supposition of a hidden depth to the space—a trap door, a sliding panel, something outside the limit. But in his ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’’’ Lacan ‘‘argues that those who consider concealment simply a matter of depth, those who think that that which lies hidden must lie underneath something else, subscribe to ‘too immutable a notion of the real,’ since what is concealed may just as easily lie on the surface.’’ 6 As Copjec explains, ‘‘Lacan, then, like Foucault, believes there is nothing but surface, but he maintains, nevertheless, that the corpse, the private ‘self,’ the purloined letter are not simply fictions; they are real’’ (RMD, 170). A successful analysis of the crime scene requires us to read the limits of the space as internal to it: not below, behind, beyond, or in any way external to the space. The line drawing offers a useful visual metaphor for the space of the crime: The limits of a figure drawn in simple lines are not external to the space they define but are continuous with that space and, on the surface, part of the same structure. In other words, the line is part of the drawing, and the drawn figure’s lines constitute a zone or ‘‘space’’ of the drawing in and of themselves. The boundaries of the locked room are precisely the space in which the movement of the criminal’s desire occurs and by which the trail of clues attaches itself to the criminal.7 The positing of a limit, then, a

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limit that is neither beyond nor below the space of signification but rather is continuous with that structure and on its surface, is as necessary to the formation of desire as it is to the definition of the crime and the work of art. The Marble Faun, both crime scene and work of art, is a story highly structured by limits and boundaries. Not only are there the moral and aesthetic limits posited and transgressed by the plot, but also rhetorical boundaries such as those that mark trajectories to the artist’s studio with frequent delays and mounting anticipation. All of these, however, are ultimately overcome as we discover the artist and work of art at the journey’s end. Hawthorne also draws a boundary around the tale itself, flanking it with both a preface and, in his revised edition of 1860, a postscript. Yet these external textual limits are blurred, too, as the author ‘‘interviews’’ his characters in his afterword and in the preface addresses a ‘‘public’’ readership whose apocryphal presence he analyzes. Beginning by referring to himself in the third person as ‘‘the Author of this Romance,’’ in his preface to the first edition of 1859 Hawthorne writes himself as a dual character: the ‘‘prim, old author’’ who naı¨vely ‘‘had always a sturdy faith’’ in the ‘‘actual existence’’ of the ‘‘Kind Reader,’’ the ‘‘Gentle Reader,’’ the ‘‘Beloved,’’ the ‘‘Indulgent,’’ or, at coldest, the ‘‘Honoured Reader,’’ and the new, more humble and disabused ‘‘I’’ who no longer has the ‘‘heart or confidence (especially, writing, as I do, in a foreign land, and after a long, long absence from my own) to presume upon the existence of that friend of friends, that unseen brother of the soul’’ (MF, 2). But by the postscript, the capitalized ‘‘Author’’ returns in full force to respond to ‘‘many readers of the foregoing pages’’ in their ‘‘demand for further elucidations respecting the mysteries of story’’ (MF, 463). Taking his characters to the top of St. Peter’s, ‘‘the Author’’ proceeds to address Hilda and Kenyon individually, quoting as dialogue their cryptic answers to Donatello and Miriam’s fates and identities and other ‘‘unresolved mysteries’’ of the tale. Thus fiction and ‘‘reality’’ intermingle as freely on the borders of Hawthorne’s text as they do at the heart of the novel, which is itself a liberal mixing of Hawthorne’s imagination and actual experiences of Rome. Through the preface and postscript in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne demonstrates that what happens beyond the strict limits of the fictional narrative is neither unrelated to nor entirely separate from the tale itself. Rather, the limits of the novel, as demarcated by the preface and the postscript, should be read as continuous with the surface structure of the novel—not separate from, not beyond, before, or below a central narrative we might wish to privilege as the ‘‘true’’ novel.

So when, in the preface to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne evokes the potentiality of a crime— draws a limit and then claims not to have crossed it—we can be justifiably suspicious. After all, there is not a single other boundary posited, either in the central body of the novel or its textual ‘‘frame,’’ that is not subsequently transgressed.8 We might begin by asking, What relation do these limits have to desire? How can we verify Hawthorne’s claim not to have crossed the limit of ‘‘stealing from a lady’’? The direction of such an investigation must lie by way of the work of art that Hawthorne admits to having stolen, which we might say is both a limit and a crime. In Kenyon’s studio, under the veil, lies one of the works that Hawthorne ‘‘stole’’ from a studio in Rome to use as his character’s masterpiece. So ‘‘Kenyon’s’’ sculpture is framed in Hawthorne’s preface as a purloined sculpture. But this is a red herring that distracts us from the fact that the purloined sculpture is also a criminal in its own turn, an impostor standing in the place of the thing Hawthorne would have used if it weren’t impossible, that is, if he were ‘‘capable of stealing from a lady.’’ At first, the purloined sculpture might seem to stand in the place of the sculpture that Hawthorne claims he didn’t steal: Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains (see page 76). But as in all good mysteries, there is a double bluff at work here. The woman sculpture is merely a stooge for the woman sculptor. The keen detective discerns that the Cleopatra stands in the place of the Woman artist herself. To identify the phallic ghost that haunts Kenyon’s Cleopatra as Hosmer’s Zenobia would be another act of the ‘‘Pygmalion effect,’’ 9 in which the woman sculptor becomes coincident with the objects she creates. In the phallic Symbolic order as described by Lacan, in which the Woman is positioned as ‘‘being’’ rather than as ‘‘having’’ the phallus, the terms of femininity are antithetical to those of artistic creativity. Confronted with the impossible figure of the Woman sculptor, phallic discourse renders the woman sculptor a woman sculpture. The discovery of the woman sculptor as a sculpture at the end of the journey to her studio is a symptom of a failure of the narrative to approach a certain limit. It is a turning away from femininity that takes refuge in the imaginary formation of woman being the phallus rather than having it. The woman artist rather than the clay model is the object beneath the veil, petrified in the medium of her work. To understand better the nature of this crime, we must look for it at the limit within the crime scene, the limit within the studio that is in the same structure as the studio. By ‘‘limit’’ I do not mean the many thresholds and limits crossed on the way to the studio, but rather the point at which movement stops in the narrative and we come up against

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something hard and immovable—the thing that Kenyon hides under a veil when he goes to admit his lady visitor to the studio; the thing, in fact, that is the object of her journey to the studio: the statue of Cleopatra, by the real-life sculptor William Wetmore Story. In the moment in which the Cleopatra is revealed to us, Kenyon has nearly forgotten it, so absorbed was he by his desire for the distant, unattainable woman he loves, whose hand he has managed to sculpt— has ‘‘stolen’’ into stone. Presuming that the marble hand was made from a cast of its living model, Miriam, the visitor to the studio, asks Kenyon, ‘‘How have you persuaded that shy maiden to let you take her hand in marble?’’ 66

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‘‘Never! She never knew it!’’ hastily replied Kenyon, anxious to vindicate his mistress’s maidenly reserve.—‘‘I stole it from her. The hand is a reminiscence. After gazing at it so often—and even holding it once, for an instant, when Hilda was not thinking of me—I should be a bungler indeed, if I could not now reproduce it to something like the life.’’ (MF, 121)

Where the author had drawn the line, his character didn’t hesitate to ‘‘steal from a lady.’’ The two artists then discuss the likelihood that Hilda, also a painter—a copyist of old masterpieces—might marry. Kenyon agrees with Miriam that it is as slim as the painter’s hand; as Miriam reasons, ‘‘When women have other objects in life, they are not apt to fall in love. I can think of many women, distinguished in art, literature, and science—and multitudes whose hearts and minds find good employment, in less ostentatious ways—who lead high, lonely lives, and are conscious of no sacrifice, so far as your sex is concerned’’ (MF, 121). To comfort the despondent Kenyon, Miriam then evokes the possibility that Hilda’s creative abilities will someday be, shall we say, castrated: ‘‘ ‘Well,’ said Miriam smiling; ‘perhaps she may sprain the delicate wrist which you have sculptured to such perfection. In that case, you may hope! These Old Masters to whom she has vowed herself, and whom her slender hand and woman’s heart serve so faithfully, are your only rivals.’ ’’ (MF, 121–22). The trajectories of phallic desire thus mapped into the narrative, Miriam bids Kenyon, ‘‘And, now, . . . show me the new statue, which you asked me hither to see’’ (MF, 123). ‘‘My new statue!’’ exclaims Kenyon. . . . ‘‘Here it is, under this veil.’’ Rightfully suspicious of veiled objects, Miriam warns, ‘‘Not a nude figure, I hope!’’ (MF, 123).

After some discussion of nudity in sculpture, Kenyon replies, ‘‘No; my statue is intended for Cleopatra’’ (MF, 125). He drew away the cloth, that had served to keep the moisture of the clay-model from being exhaled. The sitting figure of a woman was seen. . . . A marvellous repose—that rare merit in statuary, except it be the lumpish repose native to the block of stone—was diffused throughout the figure. The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever and turmoil of her life, and, for one instant—as it were, between two pulse-throbs—had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout every vein and muscle. . . . The repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to stir hand or foot again; and yet, such was the creature’s latent energy and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that you were now drawing, midway in your throat. . . . In one view, there was a certain softness and tenderness, how breathed into the statue, among so many strong and passionate elements, it is impossible to say. Catching another glimpse, you beheld her as implacable as a stone, and cruel as fire. In a word, all Cleopatra—fierce, voluptuous, passionate, tender, wicked, terrible, and full of poisonous and rapturous enchantment— was kneaded into what, only a week or two before, had been a lump of wet clay from the Tiber. Soon, apotheosized in an indestructible material, she would be one of the images that men keep forever, finding a heat in them which does not cool down, throughout the centuries. ‘‘What a woman is this!’’ exclaimed Miriam, after a long pause.— ‘‘Tell me . . . Were you not afraid to touch her, as she grew more and more towards hot life, beneath your hand?’’ (MF, 125–27)

If this tumescent clay sculpture—‘‘sunk down . . . between two pulse-throbs . . . and . . . resting throughout every vein and muscle’’ and yet smoldering with ‘‘latent energy,’’ ‘‘in one view’’ impossibly soft and tender, and yet in another glimpse ‘‘as implacable as a stone’’— strikes one as rather phallic, ‘‘one of the images that men keep forever,’’ it is nothing more than what one should expect of a work of art. For no matter how disingenuous his confession might have been, Hawthorne’s preface to The Marble Faun posits the works used in his novel, such as Story’s Cleopatra, as substitutes, proxies, for what he could not ‘‘steal from a lady.’’ In this respect the Cleopatra fulfills the function of the art object recognized within Lacanian theorization of the processes of art

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as that of a proxy—the suppliance or supplementary object that stands in the place of the phallus and is also its excess. Story’s soft but stony, reposeful yet throbbing Cleopatra points beyond itself to a supplementary jouissance prohibited by the limit articulated in the text: stealing from a lady. How can he steal something from a woman that she doesn’t have? Or better, ‘‘How can any One steal something that belongs to No One?’’ (RMD, 169). The visual image that marks this impossible limit is Harriet Hosmer’s statue of Zenobia. Zenobia, signifier of the Woman sculptor in Hawthorne’s text, seems at first to lie beyond the limits of the novel’s narrative, not to mention outside the limits of the fictional sculptor’s studio. But as we have seen, there can be no outside to the crime scene—to the text. Its empty limit is always by definition internal to the text and is in fact that which guarantees the text’s closure, which renders the artist’s studio a detective fiction’s ‘‘locked room.’’ The position of the Zenobia with respect to the Cleopatra in Hawthorne’s narrative is not unlike that accorded to it at the London International Exhibition of 1862. The Zenobia was displayed in a foursided ‘‘temple’’ structure, designed by Owen Jones to house three of John Gibson’s colored statues: Pandora, Venus, and Cupid. Gibson’s biographer and Hosmer’s friend, the photographer Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, reported: It was in the Great Exhibition of 1862 that the world had an opportunity of inspecting Gibson’s new heresy. In a light, quadrangular temple, constructed with the utmost judgment and taste by Mr. Owen Jones, three of his tinted statues—the Venus belonging to Mrs. Preston, the Pandora to Lady Marian Alford, and the Cupid to Mr. Holford—were seen to the utmost advantage; the fourth place being occupied by Miss Hosmer’s Zenobia, a finely draped figure guiltless of any stain. This was truly, as Gibson expressed himself, ‘‘A bone for the scribblers to pick.’’ And not for the scribblers only, but for the talkers too. And those perhaps talked most who knew least. For every young lady at dinner-table or in ballroom in that London season of 1862 felt herself called upon to tell her partner what she thought of ‘‘Gibson’s coloured Venus.’’ 10

As in Jones’s sculpture ‘‘temple,’’ the position of Hosmer’s Zenobia in the field of neoclassical sculpture is ‘‘just around the corner’’ from the ‘‘masterpiece,’’ the Cleopatra. Although both of these coexist under the same roof, as it were, seeing the Zenobia might require a slight shift in perspective, turning a corner in our mode of reading the text.11 The

Zenobia thus occupies an anamorphic position in Hawthorne’s Marble Faun. As Lacan famously observes in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, we might ask of the Zenobia what this strange object is, as we stand before ‘‘this display of the domain of appearance in all its most fascinating forms’’ (Fundamental Concepts, 88), that is, as our gaze is focused on the central romance of the text, bedazzled and mortified as was Miriam by the hardened, shining example of the sculptor’s mastery that is represented by the Cleopatra. ‘‘You cannot know—for you turn away, thus escaping the fascination of the picture,’’ for the Cleopatra is ‘‘a trap for the gaze’’ (Fundamental Concepts, 88, 89) in which Miriam recognizes her self, and with which she identifies as with the specular image of the Gorgon in Perseus’s shield. But turning back as we leave the presence of the Cleopatra—perhaps flicking back through the book after we have read the last page—we can apprehend this strange form. Hawthorne, like Holbein, ‘‘makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated— annihilated in the form, that is, strictly speaking, the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi of castration’’ (Fundamental Concepts, 89). ‘‘But it is further still that we must seek the function of vision,’’ Lacan warns. ‘‘We shall see then emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling and spread out function, as it is in this picture’’ (Fundamental Concepts, 89). Hosmer’s anamorphic Zenobia in The Marble Faun is a phallic ghost who has nothing to do with vision; rather, it is apprehended in a sidelong glance, in the moment of an almost-missed encounter, as ‘‘something symbolic of the function of the lack, of the appearance of the phallic ghost’’ (Fundamental Concepts, 88). To restate the analogy with Holbein’s painting, then, the Cleopatra functions as the visual lure of the ambassadors themselves, in all their finery and detailed interior. The anamorphic skull is representationally continuous with the same painted surface as the ambassadors but also participates in an oblique perspectival system that can be apprehended only if we lose sight, momentarily, of the ‘‘lure.’’ In the same way, the representation of Hosmer’s Zenobia is materially continuous with the text in which the Cleopatra is portrayed, and yet ‘‘just around the corner’’ from the central image of the novel. The Zenobia makes visible the gaze of ‘‘a quite different eye,’’ one that is no longer ‘‘a question of the geometral eye-point’’ but rather ‘‘flies in the foreground’’ (Fundamental Concepts, 89) of The Marble Faun, as easily overlooked as the purloined letter in the novel’s preface. The reason why the anamorphic image can disorganize the novel’s perspectival system, its ‘‘field of perception,’’ is that the eye/I in ques-

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tion is that of the subject of desire (Fundamental Concepts, 89). The subject of desire is the barred subject, and it is in fact this barring, this unique subjective cut, that instigates desire at the point of this limit. By reading Hawthorne’s novel literally, we can see in the limits of the text, the space of the author’s desire, that Harriet Hosmer is the representative of the impossible Woman in the text. The thing that Hawthorne cannot steal from her, marked by her sculpture of Zenobia, is the internal limit and guarantee of the text’s closure, which renders the artist’s studio a detective fiction’s ‘‘locked room.’’ To put it another way, the Cleopatra is the proxy for the work of this woman sculptor, and Kenyon the phallic substitute for the Woman sculptor herself. But this is not to say that the Woman sculptor is hidden beneath or beyond the studio and the figure of the male sculptor, waiting patiently for the feminist art historian to uncover, like Kenyon lifting the veil from his Cleopatra. I am not saying that Harriet Hosmer, her studio, and her Zenobia are the ‘‘truth’’ that lies behind the deceitful fac¸ade of Hawthorne’s fiction. These, too, are lures for the gaze—representations of what Hawthorne cannot say or figure, and not the things themselves. Rather, I am talking about that impossible figure, the Woman sculptor, who does not exist and does not signify anything. The woman sculptor Harriet Hosmer and her sculpture, Zenobia, stand in for and point to this impossible signifier at the limits of the text, as Kenyon and the Cleopatra point to them in turn. The Woman sculptor is the internal limit of Hawthorne’s fictional studio, the Thing that allows us to open the door and cross its threshold. She is the studio’s purloined letter, its central absence, the corpse around which the characters’ identities in the detective novel are constituted. The Woman sculptor is the ‘‘gap that necessitates interpretation, that prevents the signifier from signifying itself’’ (RMD, 178), and the space around which the work of art turns in Hawthorne’s novel. She is ‘‘the trace of the unnarrated,’’ the unspoken yet present absence without which everything else would cease to exist, without which Hawthorne would not have been able to write, ‘‘in a word, Cleopatra’’ (RMD, 174). She is the absent signifier that would, if it existed, make the sexual relation possible. But a sexual relation with the Woman sculptor is as impossible for Hawthorne as it is for the detective to have a happy, secure romantic relationship in film noir. Although Hawthorne loved Hosmer’s Zenobia, she could not be the response to the quest and journey to the artist’s studio, as William Wetmore Story’s fetishistic Cleopatra pretends to be the answer to the riddle of femininity. Rather, Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains is precisely the question of femininity posed by Hawthorne in The Marble Faun. At the limit of the journey to the sculptor’s studio in Hawthorne’s

novel, we discover that the Woman sculptor rather than the clay sculpture is the object beneath Kenyon’s veil; petrified like the material of her work in the ‘‘Pygmalion effect,’’ she is rendered as dead as a signifier, a marker for the hard kernel of the real where ‘‘the symbolic visibly fails to disambiguate itself’’ (RMD, 174). But like the phallus, the Woman sculptor/sculpture is also nothing, no more than an empty signifier: ‘‘In a word, all Cleopatra.’’ In the final analysis, the Cleopatra both stands in the place of the Woman sculptor and indexes the impossible point, at the limit of the text, where the real thing makes itself felt in the symbolic space of the narrative. No wonder Kenyon throws a veil over It before coming to the door of the studio to receive his lady visitor. Hawthorne’s attempt, however, to cover up the Woman in his text, to seal up this narrative and give it closure, inevitably fails. The gap that he tries to fill by substituting Story’s Cleopatra for Hosmer’s Zenobia reappears elsewhere in the narrative: In the confrontation between Miriam and Hilda over Hilda’s painting of Beatrice Cenci, the lack of the Woman artist reappears like a ghost from the Real. The trail of clues remains stubbornly attached to the purloined studio by means of the author’s desire.

notes 1. Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger, ‘‘The Becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines,’’ in Travellers’ Tales: Narrative of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson et al. (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 38. 2. ‘‘The Woman’’ is a Lacanian trope best explicated in the introduction to Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the E´cole Freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 48. References to the phallus and phallic discourse should be read in the context of Lacanian theories of subjectivity and representation, including LichtenbergEttinger’s matrixial contextualization of the Lacanian concept of the phallus. 3. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Seminar XI, 1964, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 88. Subsequent citations appear in the text as Fundamental Concepts. 4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 4. Subsequent citations appear in the text abbreviated MF. 5. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 169. Subsequent citations appear in the text abbreviated RMD. 6. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’’’ Yale French Studies, 48 (1972), 54. Quoted in RMD, 170.

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7. Inge Boer proposes the concept of the movement being in the boundary in her essay ‘‘The World beyond Our Window: Nomads, Travelling Theories and the Function of Boundaries,’’ Parallax 3 (September 1996), 7–26. 8. There are actually two such unbreachable limits posited in Hawthorne’s preface: In addition to that of ‘‘stealing from a lady,’’ there is the ‘‘meddling in public property.’’ It is beyond the scope of this argument to discuss the latter here, but such an analysis would also lie in the direction of Copjec’s question: ‘‘How is it possible to transgress territories that have no private boundaries?’’ (RMD, 169). This impossible crime against public property takes as its precondition the limits of private property. 9. Elsewhere, I have used the term ‘‘Pygmalion effect’’ to refer to the conflation and confusion of the woman sculptor with the objects of her art production in art criticism from the nineteenth century to today. In its most blatant form, the Pygmalion effect leads critics for whom it is difficult to imagine a woman being a sculptor, or a nineteenth-century woman being a sculptor, to describe the artist in terms more appropriate for description of the sculptures the artist produces. The Pygmalion effect is a product of the difficulty phallic discourse has in recognizing women as active creative agents and so finds it easier to discuss them as passive muses or works of art. See Nancy Proctor, ‘‘19th Century American Women Sculptors and the Pygmalion Effect,’’ paper delivered at ‘‘The Pygmalion Effect: Sculpture, Femininity, and Performance’’ conference, the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, November 1, 1996, and American Women Sculptors in Rome in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Feminist and Psychoanalytic Readings of a Displaced Canon, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Fine Art, University of Leeds, 1998. 10. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, Life of John Gibson, R.A. Sculptor (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870), 221. 11. This anamorphic effect is also discernible in the placement of Hosmer’s monument to Juliette Falconnet in the church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in Rome, in whose Baroque interior Hosmer’s neoclassical statue is both ‘‘a little out of place in the picture’’ and obliquely positioned ‘‘just around the corner’’ from the main visual axis of the church.

John Carlos Rowe

hawthorne’s ghost in james’s italy sculptural form, romantic narrative, and the function of sexuality in The Marble Faun, ‘‘adina,’’ and William Wetmore Story and His Friends

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Miss Hosmer is also, to say the word, very willful, and too independent by half, and is mixed up with a set whom I do not like, and I can therefore do very little for her. . . . She may or may not have inventive powers as an artist, but if she have will not she be the first woman? william wetmore story to james russell lowell (february 11, 1853), quoted in henry james, William Wetmore Story and His Friends Were [the author] capable of stealing from a lady, he would certainly have made free with Miss Hosmer’s admirable statue of Zenobia. nathaniel hawthorne, preface, The Marble Faun Story’s ‘‘Hatty’’ is of course Miss Harriet Hosmer, the most eminent member of that strange sisterhood of American ‘‘lady sculptors’’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white, marmorean flock. . . . [T]heir rise, their prosperity, their subsidence, are, in presence of some of the widely scattered monuments of their reign, things likely to lead us into bypaths queer and crooked. . . . henry james, William Wetmore Story and His Friends

In ‘‘Swept Away: Henry James, Margaret Fuller, and ‘The Last of the Valerii,’ ’’ I argued that Henry James began his literary career by repeating and in some cases extending the antifeminist views of his most important New England predecessors, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Sr., and Nathaniel Hawthorne.1 I based my argument primarily on the paternalism and defensiveness in these male transcendentalists’ accounts of their friend and literary colleague Margaret Fuller and the younger Henry James’s subsequent references to Fuller in

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his reconstruction of that interesting colony of American artists and socialites in Rome from the 1840s to 1870s in William Wetmore Story and His Friends, in which he claims to represent the ‘‘old relation, social, personal, aesthetic, of the American world to the European’’ and ends up revealing his own psycho-poetic and cultural roots.2 In particular, I examined James’s motives in William Wetmore Story for representing Fuller as what he terms the ‘‘Margaret-ghost,’’ a specter of the past that he links with that other hauntingly tragic figure for the Victorian imagination, Beatrice Cenci, whose portrait by Guido Reni hung even then in the Palazzo Barberini, where the Storys took up residence on the third floor in 1856 (W, 1 : 337).3 Both Fuller and the nineteenth-century popularity of Beatrice Cenci explicitly link James’s reflections in William Wetmore Story with Hawthorne’s fiction, notably The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1859), as well as with Hawthorne’s accounts of his own Italian experiences in his French and Italian Notebooks. Long considered the origin of Hawthorne’s Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, Fuller is one of several possible models for the mysterious and tragic Miriam in The Marble Faun. Indeed, Fuller’s involvement in the Italian republican revolution of the 1840s and her marriage to another follower of Mazzini, Marquis Angelo Ossoli, gives added credibility to the seemingly playful suggestion in Hawthorne’s 1860 ‘‘Postscript’’ to The Marble Faun that Miriam’s ‘‘secret’’ past somehow involves the turbulent politics of post1848 Italy in the struggle between republican forces and Pope Pius IX, whose claims to political power in the Papal States were defended by Napoleon III’s French army of occupation from 1849 to 1870.4 Although Hawthorne’s ‘‘Postscript’’ is often rightly considered his effort to tease readers intent upon ‘‘solving’’ a romantic mystery designed to invoke our postlapsarian history and allegorize Original Sin and felix culpa in a modern drama, his jeu d’esprit may also refer to the ‘‘family connections’’ Fuller made by marrying Marquis Ossoli, whose father was an officer in the Papal Guards and a staunch antirepublican.5 For the younger James, Fuller, with her public commitments to women’s rights and abolition, condenses many of his literary fathers’ anxieties about the attention women intellectuals and artists were attracting for their cultural work. Yet my exclusive focus in that essay on Margaret Fuller, however motivated it was by Hawthorne’s and James’s obsessive fascination with a woman both overtly trivialized, caused me to neglect the diverse group of women writers, artists, and sculptors that Hawthorne met during his two years in Italy (1858–1859), recorded in his Italian Notebooks, and are recalled, often quite curiously, by James in William Wetmore Story and His Friends. In the latter work,

James not only evokes the era of his literary fathers but entangles it with his own memories of his visits to Italy in 1869, 1872–1873, and 1873–1874, when he met some of the survivors of the cultural scene Hawthorne had enjoyed in Italy two decades earlier. These Italian visits gave James much material for the short fiction of the early 1870s, in which he both worked through the influences of his New England precursors and developed his own postromantic themes and styles. Through all of these complex Italian influences, certain nineteenthcentury masculine anxieties regarding feminine personal independence and self-assertiveness, political challenges to patriarchy, and growing public acclaim for women’s artistic and intellectual achievements continue to play through James’s writings as they do in Hawthorne’s. In what follows, I shall note both similarities and differences in Hawthorne’s and James’s efforts to defend masculine authority, both sexual and literary, against imagined feminist challenges and to negotiate the homosocial, homoerotic, and homosexual desires available in the changing sexual politics of nineteenth-century America.6 In ‘‘Swept Away,’’ I interpret the excavation and subsequent reburial of a classical sculpture of Juno in ‘‘The Last of the Valerii’’ (1874) as emblematic of James’s efforts to engage and then repress the threatening power of the New Woman—a feminine authority for which Fuller had found historical precedent in the heroic women of Greek myth and tragedy.7 James’s references to the ‘‘recovery’’ of classical sculpture include far more than just Fuller’s transcendentalism; nineteenth-century archaeology and sculpture played complementary roles in promoting the romantic classicism in sculpture, architecture, and painting that extends from the 1820s to the 1870s.8 Although they commented on its artists and works in somewhat different periods, Hawthorne and James are fascinated and at times troubled by paintings and sculptures in this mode. Millicent Bell and, more recently, Rita Gollin and John Idol have eloquently explained how Hawthorne used the pictorial and plastic arts in his fiction.9 Elaborating on their work and the many James scholars, such as Viola Winner and Adeline Tintner, who have worked on James’s debts to the pictorial arts, I want to interpret Hawthorne’s and James’s defensive responses to these sister arts. In one sense, each author incorporates sculptural and pictorial representations in his fiction in order to relate his work to more venerable artistic media; in another sense, each author is actually competing for the publicity and celebrity enjoyed by many of these nineteenth-century sculptors and painters. Nowhere is this anxiety more evident than when the artists were also women. In the epigraphs to this essay, I offer a little anthology of masculine responses to Harriet Hosmer, one of the most important Ameri-

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can sculptors in the romantic classical mode. William Story’s patronizing judgment of Hosmer betrays his own fears that Hosmer’s artistic achievement and talent might be superior to his own, as most modern art historians agree they were. Hawthorne diplomatically claims he has not borrowed any of Hosmer’s sculptures for Kenyon’s fictional studio or the other ateliers in The Marble Faun out of some chivalrous respect for her gender, but Hosmer’s heroic sculpture of Zenobia in Chains to which Hawthorne refers thereby becomes one of the several allusions of the romance, albeit segregated from the sculptures by male sculptors that are allowed to figure in the romance’s dramatic action. In fact, Hawthorne includes at least two explicit allusions to Hosmer’s work in the dramatic action of The Marble Faun. Kenyon’s sculpture of a marble hand, modeled on Hilda’s, that he shows Miriam in ‘‘A Sculptor’s Studio’’ (chapter 13), recalls the pair of hands, The Clasped Hands, that Hosmer cast from the Brownings’ hands—a now-famous Victorian sculpture of romantic love (MF, 120). Hawthorne’s frequent references to Beatrice Cenci, albeit made primarily to Guido Reni’s portrait, also include Hosmer’s sculpture of Beatrice Cenci (1856), reclining on ‘‘a raised block that serves as couch in her prison cell,’’ her ‘‘deep sleep’’ and ‘‘natural’’ pose striking a sharp contrast with her reputation in the Victorian imaginary as a monstrous hybrid of abused innocence and vengeful parricide.10 James’s identification of Hosmer with the ‘‘white marmorean flock’’ of that ‘‘strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ ’’ in Rome seems to be the most mocking and patronizing of the Harriet Hosmer, Zenobia in Chains, three (W, 1 : 257), recalling Hawthorne’s 1859. own desperate complaint against the ‘‘d[amne]d mob of scribbling women,’’ who had ‘‘occupied’’ the ‘‘public taste . . . with their trash.’’ 11 Harriet, or ‘‘Hattie,’’ Hosmer (1830 –1908) traveled from America to Italy in 1852 and to Rome in 1855 to study with John Gibson, the English sculptor working in Rome and ‘‘heir to the neoclassical tradition of Flaxman’’ and himself a student of ‘‘Canova and Thorwaldsen.’’ 12 During her many productive years as a sculptor in Rome, Hosmer

Harriet Hosmer, Beatrice Cenci, 1856. achieved prominence as one of the most important American neoclassical sculptors and as one of the central women artists in the group, which included Margaret Foley, Maria Louisa Lander, Emma Stebbins, and Edmonia Lewis.13 James mentions none of these other women sculptors by name in William Wetmore Story, although he does refer identifiably and in a racist manner to Edmonia Lewis (1845–?), who was the ‘‘daughter of an Indian [Chippewa] mother and a Negro father, both of whom died when she was three years old.’’ 14 Well-known for her sculptures of historical and ideal subjects ‘‘drawn from the struggles of the Negro cause or from the life and legends of the Indians,’’ Lewis is trivialized and racially marginalized by James: ‘‘One of the sisterhood, if I am not mistaken, was a negress, whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame’’ (W, 1 : 258).15 In James’s account of these ‘‘American ‘lady sculptors,’’’ Hattie Hosmer serves to represent them all, as if the ‘‘odd phenomenon of their practically simultaneous appearance’’ in Rome and ‘‘their rise, their prosperity, their subsidence’’ can be accounted in some manner typical of their ‘‘sisterhood’’ (W, 1 : 257–58). ‘‘Miss Hosmer had talent,’’ James admits, almost begrudgingly, but implies thereby that the other ‘‘lady sculptors’’ did not (W, 1 : 258). Hawthorne scholars know that many nineteenth-century readers of The Marble Faun considered Hattie Hosmer a possible model for Hilda.

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Many also thought Louisa Lander, who had done a bust of Hawthorne and knew the Hawthornes socially, to be a model for Miriam.16 Lander (1826–1923) had come to Rome in 1855 and had worked as a studentassistant in Thomas Crawford’s studio. Lander had an uncommonly free lifestyle even for an emancipated woman of the mid-nineteenth century, and her ‘‘indiscretions’’ in Rome caused ‘‘fellow artists’’ to form a ‘‘committee,’’ led by William Wetmore Story, ‘‘to reprimand her’’ for living out of wedlock with ‘‘‘some man’ ’’ and for having ‘‘ ‘exposed herself as a model’ ’’ in what must have been the nude.17 On behalf of this self-appointed committee of morality, Story asked Lander to ‘‘go before the American minister and swear that the rumors were untrue,’’ which Lander had the good sense and effrontery to refuse to do.18 Lander had completed the bust of Hawthorne in 1858, before the scandal about her conduct became a public issue among the colony of American artists in Rome. After her refusal to obey Story’s command, she was socially snubbed by that community, including the Hawthornes, who paid for the portrait bust but never picked it up.19 Gossip transformed her into a figure for all that was scandalous in the new and artistic women in Rome, and even Hosmer distanced herself from her colleague.20 T. Walter Herbert has suggested that the Hawthornes’ efforts to ‘‘disown’’ Lander’s portrait bust of Nathaniel were entangled with their defensive reactions to rumors of Lander’s sexual misconduct, the fact that Nathaniel had ‘‘posed’’ for her, perhaps in some state of undress (his bust conventionally represents a portion of the bare upper torso), and the psychic tangle of such libidinal associations in the weirdly repressive atmosphere of nineteenth-century U.S. morality.21 Lora Romero points out that Hawthorne often responded to popular women writers’ success by criticizing them for offering ‘‘an unmediated transcription of their private lives’’; in one notable passage Hawthorne describes Fanny Fern throwing ‘‘off the restraints of decency’’ to ‘‘come before the public stark naked.’’ 22 Literal and figurative ‘‘nudity’’ in public variously registered nineteenth-century American anxieties regarding sexuality, and these cultural tensions typically reflected contemporary political issues, such as women’s rights and abolition.23 The accomplished sculptors in Rome are only some of the many nineteenth-century American sculptors, painters, and writers composing the group that the art historian Wayne Craven terms the ‘‘second generation’’ of Americans in Italy, following such neoclassical pioneers as Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers, and Thomas Crawford.24 Many of these nineteenth-century expatriates used their neoclassical artistic styles to address the political topics of abolition and women’s rights.

Hiram Powers’s celebrated sculpture The Greek Slave (1843), which helped make the nudity of subsequent neoclassical sculptures acceptable to prudish American audiences, contributed to abolitionist politics in antebellum America, even though Powers’s subject was actually an allegory of ‘‘the heroic struggle of the Greek people to free themselves from their tyrannical masters, the Turks.’’ 25 William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra (1858), which ‘‘brought Story the greatest international fame in his own time’’ and which Hawthorne places in Kenyon’s studio in The Marble Faun, and his Libyan Sibyl (1861) both substitute African models and features for the ‘‘pure classicism’’ of Greek feminine figures. In part, Story was simply contributing to the romantic escapism of his age, which drew upon the archaeology done in the ‘‘valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, and into the deserts of the Holy Land’’ to explore civilizations that antedated the Greeks.26 In part, Story was protesting in his own remote and often misunderstood way the persistence of Southern slavery by mythologizing the roots of nineteenth-century African Americans in his heroic sculptures of legendary African women.27 Harriet Hosmer’s African Sybil (1868?) is far more politically explicit than either Story’s Cleopatra or his Libyan Sibyl. As Hosmer’s biographer, Dolly Sherwood, notes, Hosmer’s sculpture ‘‘had its genesis in the sixties, with emancipation as its theme.’’ The ‘‘black female figure’’ has a ‘‘small Negro boy at her feet,’’ to whom she is ‘‘said to be foretelling the freedom of her race.’’ 28 Although an antiabolitionist as a young woman in the late 1840s and early 1850s, probably influenced by the ‘‘moderate Whig philosophy’’ of the Crows, the family with which she lived while studying in St. Louis, Hosmer became a vigorous critic of slavery Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave, 1843. in the years leading up to the Civil War.29 James praises Story’s sculptures for turning their dynamic qualities into virtual ‘‘narratives,’’ in which the sculpture tells a complete story by way of both the figure’s pose and its various adornments. In most cases, however, James judges Story’s

sculptural narratives to be conventional evocations of ‘‘subjects . . . already consecrated to the imagination—by history, poetry, legend— and so offered them with all their signs and tokens, their features and enhancements’’ (W, 2 : 77). But the stories James reads in Story’s mythic and ideal subjects are ‘‘frankly and forcibly romantic,’’ concerned with dramatizing and thus realizing ancient legends that ‘‘previous generations’’ of sculptors had treated less successfully as ‘‘dim Academic shades’’ (W, 2 : 77, 78). Hosmer’s sculptures are often just as narrative in their dynamic qualities and told in ways that are obviously relevant to nineteenth-century political issues. Her Zenobia in Chains (1859) is nominally based on the third-century Queen of Palmyra’s rebellion against Rome, her capture by Aurelian, and her symbolic humiliation in Rome. In her regal, dignified deportment and the Greek classical lines of her shoulder-to-floor costume, Hosmer’s Zenobia is as much a nineteenth-century idealization of mythic woman as Fuller’s Juno, Iphigenia, and Antigone in Woman in the Nineteenth Century.30 When on March 15, 1859, Hawthorne visited Hosmer’s studio and viewed the clay model for the final sculpture of Zenobia in Chains, he was powerfully impressed by Hosmer’s ‘‘high, heroic ode,’’ especially in its ability to represent Zenobia’s dignified march through the streets of third-century Rome: [T]here is something in Zenobia’s air that conveys the idea of music, uproar, and a great throng all about her; whilst she walks in the midst of it, self-sustained, and kept in a sort of sanctity by her native pride. The idea of motion is attained with great William Wetmore Story, Libyan Sibyl, success; you not only perceive that 1861. she is walking, but know at just what tranquil pace she steps, amid the music of the triumph. The drapery is very fine and full; she is decked with ornaments; but the chains of her captivity hang from wrist to wrist; and her deportment—indicating a soul so much above her

misfortune, yet not insensible to the weight of it—makes these chains a richer decoration than all her other jewels . . . certainly I have seldom been more impressed by a piece of modern sculpture.31

Although Hawthorne insists in his preface to The Marble Faun not to have stolen Zenobia in Chains from Hosmer, this passage suggests that he has indeed borrowed heavily from the sculpture he so admired, not only in his representation of Miriam’s independence, mystery, and dignity, but also in the more general ambience of the Roman carnival that becomes the virtual psychic landscape for the moral anarchy Miriam and Donatello’s acts have unleashed. Despite his morally problematic translation of Hosmer’s Zenobia into characters and moral issues in The Marble Faun, Hawthorne understands quite well the transfiguration Hosmer intended to express in the defeated and chained Queen of Palmyra, forcibly marched through Rome, who becomes Hosmer’s occasion to dramatize the nineteenthcentury oppression of women. In this sense, her ‘‘chains,’’ which loop from wrist to wrist across the graceful drapery of her form and thus add to the dynamism of the sculpture (that is, its representation of Zenobia in motion), become for Hawthorne ‘‘richer decoration than all her other jewels.’’ Interestingly, Hawthorne later returns to just this detail in Hosmer’s sculpture in this notebook entry, but only after he records his chance meeting with ‘‘General Pierce’’ while walking up the ‘‘Via Babuino,’’ recalling both Pierce’s patronage of Hawthorne and their old friendship, a strong homosocial bond Hawthorne seems almost to offer as a kind of defense against the undeniable feminine power of Hosmer’s Zenobia (FIN, 494). There at the very end of the entry for March 15, Hawthorne concludes, ‘‘Zenobia’s manacles serve as bracelets; a very ingenious and suggestive idea’’ (FIN, 495). In this afterthought, Hawthorne seems to allude to the ‘‘bridal gift’’ that Miriam leaves on Hilda’s table in the final chapter of the romance: It was a bracelet, evidently of great cost, being composed of seven ancient Etruscan gems, dug out of seven sepulchres, and each one of them the signet of some princely personage. . . . Hilda remembered this precious ornament. It had been Miriam’s; and once, with the exuberance of fancy that distinguished her, she had amused herself with telling a mythical and magic legend for each gem, comprising the imaginary adventures and catastrophe of its former wearer. Thus, the Etruscan bracelet became the connecting bond of a series of seven wondrous tales, all of which, as they were dug out of seven sepulchres, were characterized by a sevenfold sepulchral gloom. . . . (MF, 462)

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As Arlin Turner points out, ‘‘Hawthorne had seen the original of this bracelet worn by Mrs. Story and had described it in his notebook as having the same components and the same history as Miriam’s bracelet.’’ 32 In the long history of feminine ornament, jewelry often serves as a valuable fetish for the woman, who herself testifies in her beauty, wealth, or lineage to the husband’s authority. Although Miriam’s magical bracelet, woven as it is of Christian sevens, serves ostensibly the conventional purpose of the bridal dowry, its subtler function in the symbolic landscape of The Marble Faun is the transmission of Miriam’s mysterious feminine power to the otherwise ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘innocent’’ Hilda. That feminine power has been entangled throughout the narrative with a certain pre-Christian, pagan, and even atavistic force that frightens characters such as Kenyon and Hilda, as well as their author, Hawthorne. What fascinates Hawthorne in Hosmer’s Zenobia in Chains is just what casts such a tragic aura over the dramatic action of The Marble Faun: It is the threat of the rebellious woman, linked for Hawthorne with the uncontrolled Dionysiac power of a pagan world never adequately controlled by early Christianity. Although James pretends that these faded, old ‘‘ghosts’’ are merely quaint reminders of a vanished age, the erotic terror Hawthorne feared in self-reliant women, especially that ‘‘scribbling mob’’ and those women sculptors in Rome, surfaces in James’s recollection of how Story’s sculpture of Cleopatra is incorporated into Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. Noting how ‘‘the mysterious Miriam . . . comes, in her sad unrest, to the studio of Kenyon, and makes acquaintance there with the image of a grand seated woman, . . . who is none other than a fine prose transcript of Story’s Cleopatra,’’ James quotes Kenyon’s recollection of the ‘‘source of his vision’’ in that passage in which Hawthorne wonderfully captures the erotic power of artistic creation: ‘‘‘I kindled a great fire in my mind and threw in the material . . . and in the midmost heat uprose Cleopatra as you see her’’’ (W, 2 : 85–86). James subordinates the sexual, pagan, and decisively African power of Cleopatra to Kenyon’s artistic process, terming this ‘‘the phenomenon of a recognition, an assimilation,’’ by which the book takes the place of the sculpture and thus Hawthorne’s narrative displaces the threatening femininity of the legendary queen. James reads the fictional scene in which Miriam and Kenyon sexually desire each other through the medium of the sculpture as an erotic sublimation, which he interestingly figures as the casting of drapery over a presumably nude sculptural figure: ‘‘She saw her, Miriam, as romantically as the artist could have wished, weaving fine fancies about her in the gentle Hawthornesque way; as a result of which, and of the talk, of the scene, of the whole charming context and con-

fusion, the beautiful light mantle of the book, all loose and soft and ample, is thrown over the statue’’ (W, 2 : 86). James’s graceful metaphor for Hawthorne’s Marble Faun as classical drapery thrown over the nudity of the sculptural form of Story’s Cleopatra, who in fact reveals only one breast in symbolic anticipation of the asp, suggests that literary narrative sublimates the eroticism more flagrantly displayed in neoclassical sculpture of the period. Story’s poem ‘‘Cleopatra’’ concludes with lines that expose Story’s own interpretation of Cleopatra as a link to the primitive sexuality more clearly delineated in ancient rituals and myths than in our sophisticated modern arts. Calling for Antony to return, she appeals to their common animal passions: 83

Come, as you came in the desert, Ere we were women and men, When the tiger passions were in us, And love as you loved me then! 33

Stilted as Story’s poetic sentiments are, they nonetheless evoke the undifferentiated animal sexuality that James seems intent on controlling with the form of the romance, whether Hawthorne’s or his own. In the main, James is following Hawthorne’s lead; Hawthorne praises Story, referring to his Cleopatra in particular, for the sculptor’s sensibility for ‘‘something deeper . . . than merely to make beautiful nudities and baptize them by classical names’’ (FIN, 71). Rita Gollin and John Idol conclude that Hawthorne’s ‘‘offhand remark about ‘beautiful nudities’ conveys contemptuous disapproval of the commonplace neoclassical works of most of the other expatriate sculptors.’’ 34 Despite his admiration for Hiram Powers as ‘‘a great man,’’ Hawthorne nonetheless judges the Venus de Medici to be so superior to the modern ‘‘Venuses,’’ including ‘‘Greek Slaves’’ and ‘‘Eves’’ by ‘‘Gibson or Powers, or a hundred other men who people the world with nudities,’’ as to condemn these poor imitations to be ‘‘burnt into quicklime, leaving us only this statue as our image of the beautiful’’ (FIN, 302).35 Of course, James’s views at the turn of the century should not be equated with Hawthorne’s in the 1850s, even when James appears in William Wetmore Story to be repeating and even underscoring Hawthorne’s reactions to artworks and artists in Italy. As I argue below, James’s appropriation of Hawthorne’s opinions represents more general changes toward gendered, racial, and sexual politics, including the greater visibility of women and the articulation of homosexuality in the public sphere in James’s era.36 The transformation of women’s rights

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into such specific political movements as suffrage and the contrary demonization of same-sex relationships in the medical and legal practices of the late nineteenth century do not mean, however, that the cultural repression of such matters in the earlier part of the century renders such sexual politics invisible. Hawthorne’s and James’s attitudes are different, even when they employ some of the same artworks, artists, and historical locales, but in their mutual interpretations they represent effectively the defenses of middle-class, white males—in this case, two highly intellectual and imaginative ones—to changing social values with regard to race, sex, and gender. Although James notes Story’s love of the ‘‘nude, as the artist, in any field, essentially and logically must’’ and how Story ‘‘paid . . . such frank tribute’’ to it ‘‘in marble, in verse, in prose,’’ James devotes particular attention to Story’s use of sculptural drapery, connecting it less with the pure technique of the sculptor than with the more general ‘‘narrativity’’ by which Story told the ‘‘story’’ of his sculptural subject, whether nominally nude, partially nude, or fully clothed: ‘‘Drapery, that is, folds and dispositions of stuff and applications, intimations of ornament, became a positive and necessary part of his scheme from the moment that scheme was romantic; nothing being more curious than the truth that though the nude may have a dozen other convincing notes it is eminently destitute of that one— or possesses it only when conscious, contrasted or opposed’’ (W, 2 : 82–83).37 It is a strange comment, understandable only in the context of nineteenth-century debates regarding the propriety of the nude form as a subject for sculpture, sexuality as a topic for literature, and erotic passion as a fit subject for opera or music, unless that libidinal exposure can somehow be ‘‘draped,’’ formally contextualized, or otherwise controlled. In his account of his breakfast meeting with Harriet Hosmer and other artists at the Storys on May 23, 1858, Hawthorne notes his suggestion to Hosmer ‘‘for the design of a fountain,—a lady bursting into tears, water gushing from a thousand pores, in literal translation of the phrase; and to call the statue Niobe, all Tears,’’ in which the very ‘‘beautiful drapery about the figure’’ would be composed of her tears or, in strictly technical terms, the water of the fountain, at once suggestively revealing the feminine figure and yet hiding it with the very bodily fluids by which Niobe’s loss of her children is eternally expressed (FIN, 217–18). Hawthorne’s weirdly defensive design anticipates James’s concern that the sculptural narrative, either in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun or Story’s somewhat gimmicky allegorical sculptures, would ‘‘drape’’ the otherwise flagrant sexuality and erotic power manifest in neoclassical sculpture and more generally in the

changing roles of women and racial minorities in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In his interpretation of Hawthorne’s Marble Faun in William Wetmore Story, James understands Hawthorne’s attempt to sublimate and control the libidinal energy represented by Miriam because James shares Hawthorne’s anxieties about new feminine authority in culture and politics. Hawthorne’s romance is, among many other marvelous and interesting effects, a cathartic narrative, in which all that Donatello and Miriam represent may be entertained imaginatively for the sake of a ritual literary purgation that allows Hawthorne and the ideal reader to affirm the conventional division of gender represented by Kenyon and Hilda, as well as to assign each of these happy, Protestant characters the domestic duties of love and reproduction and the public responsibilities of cultural representation. In Kenyon’s Cleopatra and Hilda’s copy of Guido Reni’s Beatrice Cenci, the dangerous eroticism, revolutionary politics, and pre-Christian atavism of Donatello and Miriam may be expressed and controlled, much in the manner Nietzsche understood the Apollinian powers of Platonic philosophy to have rationalized the Dionysian energies of pre-Attic Greek ritual and the subsequent Greek tragedy in which such religion assumed social forms.38 The curiously triangulated relationship in The Marble Faun among Donatello, Miriam, and the mysterious Capuchin emissary or stalker, whom Donatello will hurl from the Tarpeian Rock in nearly mystic accord with Miriam’s suggestive glance, suggests that these fears encompass far more than instabilities in conventional nineteenth-century relations of masculinity and femininity.39 Donatello and the Model are more like doppelga¨nger for Miriam than sexual partners or antagonists; much as Hawthorne tries to convince the naı¨ve reader to believe that Donatello and Miriam are merely conventional lovers, their relationship suggests a much more profound compatibility or spiritual complementarity. The unnaturalness of each character seems to be that he or she is androgynous: Donatello is too ‘‘faun-like’’ to be only a man, and Miriam is too mysteriously powerful to be merely a woman. The unstable gender roles of Donatello and Miriam, as well as the intriguing ambiguity of their romantic relationship, are part of the supernatural aura of The Marble Faun. It is an atmosphere that reflects nineteenth-century anxieties about sexuality prompted in part by destabilizations of conventional gender hierarchies. Scott Derrick has argued that in The Scarlet Letter ‘‘Dimmesdale’s dislocation from a conventional relation to a stabilizing and idealized femininity produces a mobility of desire in his relations to other men,’’

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notably to Roger Chillingworth.40 In an analogous sense, Miriam’s mysterious triangular relationship with the Model and Donatello represents Hawthorne’s sense that emancipated women have disrupted, if not disfigured, conventional gender relations socially authorized in marriage and the family. The consequences of such gender destabilizations include the surfacing of a threatening homoeroticism that conventional modes of homosociality cannot control. In this latter regard, Kenyon and Donatello’s incomplete friendship, qualified as it is by their sometimes conflicting sexual desires for Miriam and even at times for each other, is a good example from Hawthorne’s romance. Hawthorne feminizes a threatening homoerosis, in ways compatible with antebellum U.S. repression of homosexuality that resurfaces in disguised ways in the public conflicts regarding women’s rights. As I shall argue below, James will rely on gender differences as occasions for entertaining same-sex desires and struggles. James is no less defensive about gender and sexual questions than Hawthorne, but James’s attitudes are more typical of late nineteenth-century cultural attitudes. That Hawthorne should have imagined The Marble Faun in its title, Roman settings, and major themes according to metaphors of sculpture should not surprise us when we consider how nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture achieved notoriety not only for its sculptures of nude women but also of men. What historians of American sculpture consider the ‘‘breakthrough’’ of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave in terms of using female nudity to express a serious theme, such as slavery, in a classical style led to a wide range of nude or partially draped male and female figures that are profoundly erotic, even while legitimated for public viewing by their allusions to classical forms and their treatment of serious topics. For many nineteenth-century sculptors, like Powers, the justification for their technically brilliant celebrations of the nude body included their religious convictions that ‘‘they were in a position to improve upon the art of the ancient Greeks because their contemporary art was not an art of heathen idolatry but one imbued with Christian virtues and morality.’’ 41 The celebration of the nude classical figure led to a host of nineteenth-century sculptures of fauns, satyrs, shepherds, and young rustics, some based on classical myths and others generalized according to classical originals viewed in Rome, Florence, and Athens. Among the sculptures Hawthorne mentions in his preface and transports in the romance to Kenyon’s studio is Benjamin Paul Akers’s (1825–1861) The Dead Pearl Diver (1858), which depicts a nude young man, draped only about his loins with his pearl-divers’ net, arched on his back upon a rock, his head tilted backward, arms beneath his head, eyes closed, and thighs apart

Benjamin Paul Akers, The Dead Pearl Diver, 1858. with crossed feet. Art historians attribute the great celebrity of this sculpture to the way it allows the viewer ‘‘that strange pleasure of indulging in a languishing contemplation of death.’’ 42 This is just how Miriam views Akers’s sculpture in ‘‘A Sculptor’s Studio’’ (chapter 13) in the romance, where it has become Kenyon’s work.43 Obviously foreshadowing the fates of Miriam and Donatello, allegorizing their doom rather than the death of the Model, the ‘‘Pearl Diver’’ represents a body that even outside Hawthorne’s romance is distinctly androgynous. Miriam complains to Kenyon that ‘‘physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient repose,’’ and this criticism represents the discomfort, albeit a titillating one, of viewing a nude male form whose sculptural dynamism combines the death throe and sexual desire, the troubling conjunction of thanatos and eros (MF, 117). I commented above on Henry James’s admiration of William Wetmore Story’s use of both sculptural drapery and narrativity to cover the nudity that otherwise disturbs him in neoclassical sculptures. Hawthorne follows a similar procedure in The Marble Faun by introducing a celebrated neoclassical sculpture into his narrative in order to control the vagrant sexuality represented by Miriam and Donatello. The ‘‘death’’ of Akers’s pearl diver and the tragic death of the Model in the romance are displacements of the sexual ambiguities these figures represented in nineteenth-century culture. There is something false, after

all, in James’s appeal to Story’s use of sculptural parerga to tell his romantic narrative because a nude form, like Powers’s Greek Slave, whose chains do not hide the beauty of her body, readily communicates her story of abjection and servitude. On several levels, James’s admiration of Story’s sculptures seems forced. He lacks enthusiasm for Story as a biographical subject, whose career as a dabbler in several arts typifies all that James struggled in his own work to avoid.44 James claims in William Wetmore Story and His Friends that Story is simply ‘‘non-narratable,’’ a subject whose story cannot be successfully told, but then leaves the reader in some doubt about what this means. At times, James suggests hopefully that Story is a ‘‘renaissance’’ man, whose many talents are beyond the biographer’s limited talents. More often, James hints at Story’s inadequacies, as when James concludes that Story’s ‘‘preference’’ for ‘‘the figure for which accessories were of the essence’’ is ‘‘doubtless a proof . . . that he was not with the last intensity a sculptor’’ (W, 2 : 83). James probably has in mind here sculptures such as Story’s Medea (1864), whose thoughtful pose is balanced by the dagger she grips in her right hand as a somewhat gimmicky comment on just what she is planning. Yet, the moment James has passed this negative judgment, he hastens to claim that Story’s literary interests were ‘‘active diversions’’ that prove not so much that ‘‘he failed to grasp the plastic, but much rather that he saw it everywhere’’ (W, William Wetmore Story, Medea, 1864. 2 : 84). In his ambivalent account of Story and his reputation as a sculptor, James ends up using Story to pursue his own aesthetic interest in the ways prose fiction should employ narrative to ‘‘drape’’ its subjects. By identifying Story’s limitations as a storyteller in stone, James can then offer to supplement Story’s deficiencies with his own writing.45 What Story has accomplished unevenly or diffidently, James claims

in 1903 to have achieved with the highest rhetorical skill. Thus, even as James gently satirizes Story for his sculptural ‘‘accessories’’ and ‘‘drapery,’’ he translates the narrative devices of sculpture into the finer narrative means of prose fiction. And what James claims in William Wetmore Story to prize in the subtler qualities of literary narrative is its ability to disguise, transform, and complicate what otherwise is the merely exposed, ‘‘nude’’ subject. This may appear to be James’s graceful way of talking about the subtleties of his version of literary realism, in which the mere crudity of the actual literary subject—naı¨ve realism—is replaced by that embroidered tapestry of social relations, in which a more complex reality is represented. Nevertheless, it is remarkable how often the nominal topic of James’s fiction revolves around specific issues of sexuality, ranging from the courtship-marriage and adultery plots of so many of his novels to the narratives of psychological development from child to adult, in which the former issues of explicit sexuality are also involved. In his early short fiction, strongly influenced by Hawthorne’s romantic themes, James’s narrativization of sexual themes is particularly evident, perhaps because he had not yet mastered the rhetorical means of disguising these underlying concerns. The early stories of the late 1860s and early 1870s are also notable for their explicit treatments of homoerotic and heterosexual themes and plots, reflecting his own unstable sexuality in his early adulthood. In ‘‘Swept Away,’’ I concluded my historical recovery of James’s efforts to control the threatening feminine identity of Margaret Fuller by interpreting ‘‘The Last of the Valerii’’ as a story in which the power of the New Woman, connected rhetorically with heroic Greek women, virtually ‘‘feminizes’’ Count Valerio, the protagonist, who must surrender to his wife Martha’s command that they rebury the unearthed sculpture of Juno if he is to preserve his masculinity. In ‘‘The Last of the Valerii,’’ homoeroticism is suggested in the switching of gender roles between Count Valerio and his stony ‘‘Juno,’’ who assumes a phallic authority over him, even down to the fetish of her hand that he will secretly preserve after the statue is safely reburied.46 In ‘‘Adina,’’ published in Scribner’s Monthly in 1874, only a few months after ‘‘The Last of the Valerii,’’ homoerotic imagery and intersubjective relations structure the plot and dramatic action. In this respect, ‘‘Adina’’ far more closely resembles the homoerotic focus of ‘‘A Light Man’’ (1869) than ‘‘The Last of the Valerii,’’ although the latter story more obviously shares the Italian setting and religious theme of Catholicism versus Protestantism in ‘‘Adina.’’ Set in Rome, the surrounding campagna, and the Alban Hills, ‘‘Adina’’ tells the story of how the cynical and very modern Sam Scrope tricks a young Italian peasant,

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Angelo Beati, out of a priceless Roman intaglio Angelo has unearthed in the countryside. In revenge, Angelo woos and marries Scrope’s fiance´e, the innocent Adina Waddington, and the defeated and disgusted Scrope tosses the intaglio into the Tiber.47 Narrated by Scrope’s unnamed friend, the story follows a familiar romantic triangle with certain vaguely Gothic effects that James borrows from Hawthorne. The triangular relationship in the story operates primarily among the three male characters, Sam Scrope, the narrator, and Angelo Beati. Adina Waddington is a mere plot device, hardly a character: ‘‘She was short and slight and blonde, and her black dress gave a sort of infantine bloom to her fairness. She wore her auburn hair twisted into a thousand fantastic braids, like a coiffure in a Renaissance drawing, and she looked out at you from grave blue eyes, in which, behind a cold shyness, there seemed to lurk a tremulous promise to be franker when she knew you better.’’ 48 The narrator notes that ‘‘her pretty name of Adina seemed to me to have somehow a mystic fitness to her personality’’ (A, 359), but he never glosses the meaning of the name. A variant on Edna, ‘‘Adina’’ derives from a Hebrew word meaning ‘‘full of menstrual fluid’’ and more generally ‘‘rejuvenation.’’ It is the answer God gives Sarah, Abraham’s wife, when she asks how she can still be fertile at more than one hundred years old after she learns that she is pregnant with Isaac.49 There is another more contemporary allusion in the name ‘‘Adina,’’ who is the heroine of Gaetano Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, the romantic opera in which Adina (the soprano) is the wealthy owner of a country estate, where she falls in love with the young peasant Nemorino (the tenor). The ‘‘elixir of love’’ is the cheap Bordeaux wine sold to Nemorino by the quack doctor Dulcamara (the bass), but this is a mere operatic device to work out themes of conflict between country and city, peasantry and gentry, man and woman.50 Both the Old Testament’s Sarah and Donizetti’s and Romani’s Adina suggest far more feminine power than James’s Adina Waddington initially displays, although they identify her with a noble cultural genealogy. In James’s narrative, the erotic power that this typically Victorian woman-child will display later in the narrative is the result of the phallic sexuality unleashed in the text by the conflict between Sam Scrope and Angelo Beati for the priceless intaglio. The Roman topaz intaglio is the fetish for the psychosexual authority over which Sam and Angelo fight and whose struggle the narrator tries precariously and unsuccessfully to mediate. Angelo accidentally unearths this ancient intaglio in a scene so charged with erotic significance as hardly to require interpretation:

He had observed in a solitary ilex-tree, of great age, the traces of a recent lightning strike. . . . The tree had been shivered and killed, and the earth turned up at its foot. The bolt, burying itself, had dug a deep, straight hole, in which one might have planted a stake. ‘‘I don’t know why,’’ said our friend, ‘‘but as I stood looking at it, I thrust the muzzle of my old gun into the aperture. It descended for some distance and stopped with a strange noise, as if it were striking a metallic surface. I rammed it up and down and heard the same noise. . . . I . . . dug, and scraped and scratched; and, in twenty minutes, fished up a little, rotten, iron box. It was so rotten that the lid and sides were as thin as letter-paper. When I gave them a knock, they crumbled. . . . In the middle lay this stone, embedded in earth and mould. There was nothing else. I broke the box to pieces and kept the stone. Ecco!’’ (A, 353)

This scene of excavation, like the unearthing of the Juno in ‘‘The Last of the Valerii,’’ is full of references to Hawthorne, perhaps none of the possible allusions being more important than the episode in chapter 46, ‘‘A Walk on the Campagna,’’ in The Marble Faun when Kenyon, waiting to meet Miriam and Donatello at the ruins of a suburban Roman villa, casually uncovers a Greek sculpture of Venus that Hawthorne declares superior to the Venus de Medici or Venus de Milo, a ‘‘sculpture in which we recognize Womanhood, and that, moreover, without prejudice to its divinity’’ (MF, 424).51 It is not ideal Womanhood, however, that James’s story excavates, but masculine sexuality and power. Although the intaglio remains encrusted with earth and mold, in ways evocative of the scatological motifs of its discovery, Angelo declares it to be the priceless gem ‘‘Julius Caesar had worn . . . in his crown’’ (A, 353).52 Trivializing Angelo’s claims, Scrope tosses ten scudi on the ground and canters away with the intaglio in hand before Angelo can accept or reject the offer. Back in Rome, Sam takes the stone to his chamber and uses ‘‘the best methods of cleansing, polishing, and restoring’’ it while keeping its existence a secret and swearing the narrator to secrecy. The language James uses in this episode is also profoundly erotic: Scrope goes about ‘‘whistling and humming odd scraps of song, like a lover freshly accepted’’ and the narrator imagines himself and Scrope riding away from Angelo ‘‘like a pair of ravishers in a German ballad’’ (A, 356).53 Angelo’s Christian name appears merely to be an obvious way to underscore the religious subplot of the story, in which modern, New England Protestant values struggle with Italian Catholic values in James’s

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youthfully schematic treatment of two religions we know to be far more complex and historically intertwined. Angelo is also one of the given names of Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, Margaret Fuller’s husband, the object of both Hawthorne’s and James’s criticism of Fuller for falling ‘‘victim to lust.’’ The Marquis Ossoli was hardly a rustic Italian peasant, but Hawthorne took note of ‘‘Ossoli’s extraordinary good looks and his lack of intellect,’’ both of which are crucial to the characterization of Angelo Beati in James’s ‘‘Adina.’’ 54 Angelo seeks revenge on Scrope, coming to Rome, dressed in an urban suit that crudely but effectively helps sophisticate him and enables him to challenge the American. Indeed, by the end of the narrative, Angelo and Adina have moved to a Roman apartment, completing the Hawthorne-like emplotment of action from the country to the city. James introduces Angelo in the pose of one of the many fauns, satyrs, and classical shepherds that had provided such erotically charged subjects for nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptors: We came upon a figure asleep on the grass. A young man lay there, all unconscious, with his head upon a pile of weed-smothered stones. A rusty gun lay on the ground beside him, and an empty game-bag, lying near it. . . . One of his legs was flung over the other; one of his arms was thrust back under his head, and the other resting loosely on the grass; his head drooped backward, and exposed a strong, young throat; his hat was pulled over his eyes, so that we could see nothing but his mouth and chin. (A, 350)

James had seen his own version of this Hawthornesque pastoral figure on one of the many horseback rides he had taken in the Roman campagna in the spring of 1873, usually in the company of American women, such as Sarah Wister, Mrs. Charles Sumner, and Lizzie Boott.55 In his 1873 essay ‘‘Roman Rides,’’ later collected in Italian Hours (1909), James describes his chance view of ‘‘a shepherd’’ who ‘‘had thrown himself down under one of the trees in the very attitude of Meliboeus,’’ the shepherd who finds and raises the abandoned baby Oedipus and who typifies the rustic displaced from his pastoral home: ‘‘He had been washing his feet . . . and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out on the turf and his soft peaked hat over his long hair crushed back like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he . . . little fancied that he was a symbol of old-world meanings to new-world eyes.’’ 56 Both of James’s Italian rustics suggest an easy, familiar, and

innocent sexuality that James would associate throughout his career with the charm and appeal of Italy. But it is hardly this sort of innocent sensuality that Sam Scrope reveals at long last as a consequence of his secret rubbing and polishing of the topaz intaglio he has stolen from Angelo Beati. In his enthusiasm, the narrator notes, Scrope ‘‘made his way into my room,’’ long ‘‘after I had gone to bed,’’ and ‘‘shook me out of my slumbers as if the house were on fire’’ to reveal the secret of the intaglio: In the centre was a full-length naked figure, which I supposed at first to be a pagan deity. Then I saw the orb of sovereignty in one outstretched hand, the chiselled imperial sceptre in the other, and the laurel-crown on the low-browed head. All round the face of the stone, near the edges, ran a chain of carven figures—warriors, and horses, and chariots, and young men and women interlaced in elaborate confusion. Over the head of the image, within this concave frieze, stood the inscription: DIVUS TIBERIUS CÆSAR TOTIUS ORBIS IMPERATOR.

. . . It was in every way a gem among gems, a priceless treasure. (A, 356–57)

At first glance, Scrope’s ‘‘discovery’’ of a large, topaz intaglio of ‘‘superb’’ ancient workmanship and representing the Emperor Tiberius, or Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar (born 42 b.c.e., died 37 c.e.; reign, 14–37 c.e.), appears merely a romantic device in James’s story to mark the boundary between pagan and Christian eras, as Tiberius was the reigning Roman Emperor when Christ was crucified in Judaea (29 c.e.). Like Shelley’s fictional ‘‘Ozymandias’’ (1818), Tiberius testifies to the vanity of humanity’s imperial and divine aspirations. Viewed from the Christian era, as the muck of history must be scraped from his image, Tiberius’s deification (‘‘divus’’) by the Romans and his claim to be ‘‘Emperor of the Entire Earth’’ (‘‘totius orbis imperator’’) are mocked by the scattered ruins of ancient Rome that nineteenth-century American tourists visited. Like ‘‘The Last of the Valerii’’ and ‘‘At Isella,’’ ‘‘Adina’’ criticizes the Americans who invaded Italy in the last half of the nineteenth century and commodified classical civilization. In William Wetmore Story and His Friends, James recalls how he was one of the select company in Rome ‘‘during the winter of 1873–1874,’’ listening to Story read ‘‘so richly and forcibly’’ his tragedy Nero, but it is clear that James considers Story’s experiment in neoclassical drama to be even more forced and artificial than some of his sculptures (W, 2 : 254).57

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The details James adds to the ‘‘splendid golden topaz,’’ such as Tiberius’s ‘‘naked figure’’ and ‘‘young men and women interlaced in elaborate confusion’’ seem at first merely to reflect conventions of nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture. In fulfilling his congressional commission to do a colossal state sculpture of George Washington (1841), for example, Horatio Greenough delivered an 11.33-foot-high (3.45 meters) marble sculpture of Washington seated seminude in the pose of the Greek god Zeus, holding his right hand up, with the index finger pointing heavenward, his left hand extending a sheathed sword as if to suggest the swift punishment that violation of his divine authority will bring. Contemporary with Powers’s Greek Slave, Greenough’s Washington was roundly ridiculed for its reference to despotic and pagan authority. Draped from the waist down, part of his royal toga tossed over his upraised right arm, Washington appears especially absurd because his nude upper torso is so obviously intended to evoke the classical convention of physical power as a symbol of divine authority. James’s narrator is careful to point out, however, that the intaglio represents Tiberius as ‘‘a full-length naked figure,’’ leading him to mistake the figure at first for ‘‘a pagan deity’’ (A, 356). Swerving from neoclassical artistic conventions to psychosexual commentary, James develops Sam Scrope’s interpretation of the gem and its symbolic figure: ‘‘ ‘I’ve annulled the centuries— I’ve resuscitated a totius orbis imperator. Do you conceive, do you apprehend, does your heart thump against your Horatio Greenough, George ribs? . . . This is where Caesar wore it, Washington, 1841. dull modern—here, on his breast, near the shoulder, framed in chiselled gold, circled about with pearls as big as plums, clasping together the two sides of his gold-stiffened mantle. It was the agraffe of the imperial purple.’ . . . and he took up the splendid jewel, and held it against my breast’’ (A, 357). Mock heroic and ironic as the modern Scrope is in this histrionic scene, he nonetheless condenses in it a number of more serious moments from Hawthorne’s fiction, such as the secret homoerotic scenes between Dimmesdale and Chillingworth in The Scarlet Let-

ter and the numerous hypotyposes of sculpture in The Marble Faun, including such central events as Kenyon’s display of the marble hand of Hilda to Miriam and his excavation of the suburban ‘‘Venus’’ in the ruins of the Roman villa. The intaglio also departs significantly from, almost reverses, the hieratic marble forms of neoclassical sculpture. The design of an intaglio is cut into the stone, producing the design by concave surfaces rather than by the convexity of the sculptural shape. And the intaglio is small, necessitating the close examination that differs so markedly from the distant view required to take in a large sculpture to full effect. In his Italian Notebooks, Hawthorne comments on the different perspective required to examine gems; the contrast he makes is between his viewing of the Venus de Medici in the Uffizi and a visit to the ‘‘gem-room’’ in the Florentine gallery: I next went . . . to the Uffizi, . . . where the Venus di Medici [sic] deigned to reveal herself rather more satisfactorily than at my last visit. . . . The contents of the gem-room especially require to be looked at separately in order to convince one’s self of their minute magnificences. . . . Greater [larger] things can be reasonably well appreciated with a less scrupulous though broader attention; but in order to estimate the brilliancy of the diamond eyes of a little agate bust, for instance, you have to screw your mind down to them and nothing else. . . . You must sharpen your faculties of observation to a point, and touch the object exactly on the right spot, or you do not appreciate it at all. (FIN, 404)

James suggests a similar phenomenology in the intricate and microcosmic design of the intaglio in ‘‘Adina,’’ even at the risk of his reader recognizing the technical absurdity of his claim that Tiberius’s nudity might be represented in an intaglio’s engraved surface in any way we might perceive it. The intaglio represents, then, the reverse of sculptural form, yet it incorporates precisely the ‘‘nudity’’ to which James would object thirty years later in his discussion of ‘‘The Draped and the Nude’’ in neoclassical sculptures (W, 2 : 83). In Part II of ‘‘Adina,’’ James develops Scrope’s engagement to Adina Waddington, Angelo’s vengeance against Scrope in wooing and marrying her, as well as his apparent conversion of her to Roman Catholicism, in a Gothic gesture that must have made many of James’s New England readers shudder in horror.58 James does not represent directly Angelo’s efforts to change Adina’s affections, leaving such scenes to the imagination of the reader in a manner reminiscent of Hawthorne’s and reinforc-

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ing thereby the secrecy through which Angelo counters the trick Scrope has played upon him.59 It helps, of course, that Angelo is physically beautiful whereas Scrope is introduced in the narrative as ‘‘very ugly the poor fellow’’ (A, 349). Yet what really appears to drive Adina into Angelo’s arms is Scrope’s proposal that his fiance´e accept the intaglio as a wedding present and then ‘‘wear it one of these days as a medallion,’’ which she finds impossible, given her religious convictions: ‘‘The stone is beautiful, but I should feel most uncomfortable in carrying the Emperor Tiberius so near my heart. Wasn’t he one of the bad Emperors— one of the worst? It is almost a pollution to have a thing that he looked at and touched coming to one in such direct descent’’ (A, 367). Modern historians have largely discounted legends of Tiberius’s cruelty, blaming his ill-chosen praetorian prefects, Sejanus and Macro, for despotism, and the legends of his licentious lifestyle have been totally discredited. In the Victorian imagination, however, the emperor who ruled when Christ was crucified typified the social and personal decadence identifiable with the ‘‘decline’’ of the Roman Empire. Where an innocent young woman should wear some Christian emblem, such as a cross, Scrope cynically proposes to pin this sign not only of pagan despotism but also of his ownership of this ‘‘blonde angel of New England origin’’ (A, 367). The narrator tries to dissuade Scrope from his plan by arguing that such a ‘‘massive medallion’’ might be worn as ‘‘a necklace,’’ but only by ‘‘a splendid, dusky beauty, with the brow of a Roman Empress, and the shoulders of an antique statue’’ (A, 361; emphasis added). ‘‘A fair, slender girl,’’ like Adina, would ‘‘feel as if it were pulling her down to the ground, and giving her a mysterious pain’’ (A, 361). Hawthorne’s themes of sin, fall, and redemption are here charged with the erotic conflict of Adina subjected to a fetish of phallic power that will cause her ‘‘mysterious pain.’’ Unquestionably, the topaz intaglio is a fetish for Adina, another instance of the familiar commodification of nineteenth-century women whereby masculine desire takes the place of the woman herself. The conventional fetishism supporting patriarchal hierarchy in this period is further complicated by the narrator’s sense that this priceless gem is ‘‘appropriate’’ only for a pagan ‘‘lady,’’ whose ‘‘dusky beauty’’ recalls Miriam’s mystery and the curious entanglement of threatening femininity with racial otherness in the nineteenth century, insofar as the intaglio also incorporates the homoerotic bond between Scrope and the narrator: ‘‘ ‘Down on your knees, barbarian, we’re in a tremendous presence! Haven’t I worked all these days and nights, with my little rags and files, to some purpose? I’ve annulled the centuries—I’ve resusci-

tated a totis orbis imperator . . . does your heart thump against your ribs?’ ’’ (A, 357). Adina abandons her stepmother and affianced, Sam Scrope. Angelo whisks her away to an apartment in Rome, where the narrator visits the couple to determine whether they are truly happy, only to learn the customary Jamesian lesson that there is little way to distinguish between Angelo’s love for Adina and his love of his triumph over Scrope. Meeting Scrope in Rome, the narrator accompanies him onto the ‘‘bridge of St. Angelo,’’ leading in one direction to the Castel Sant’Angelo, the gloomy prison of Beatrice Cenci. There, midway across the bridge, in a symbolic action too neat and conventional for the art James would later achieve, Scrope tosses the ‘‘curse,’’ that ‘‘golden gem, with its cruel emblems,’’ into the Tiber, from whence so many ancient treasures were excavated from the renaissance to our own century (A, 382). Standing together in ritual secrecy, Sam Scrope and the narrator achieve a bond that entangles homosocial authority with homoerotic desire: ‘‘Then he drew a small velvet case from his pocket, opened it, and let something shine in the moonlight. It was the beautiful, the imperial, the baleful topaz. He looked at me and I knew what his look meant. It made my heart beat, but I did not say—no!’’ (A, 382). Of course, the antecedence is strategically ambiguous, anticipating more important and complex moments of moral and erotic undecidability in James’s fiction, such as just what Miles sees in his final moments in the arms and over the shoulder of his governess in The Turn of the Screw. Whether it is the aesthetic beauty of that intaglio, the phallic power of its naked central figure, Tiberius, or Scrope’s significant ‘‘look,’’ what makes the narrator’s ‘‘heart beat’’ and which he does not refuse is also a splendid amalgam of a passion affirmed and repressed: ‘‘I did not say—no!’’ James’s responses to Story’s sculptural works and Hawthorne’s Italian fiction reveal his cultural forebears’ anxieties about the instabilities of sexuality and gender occasioned by the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement and the independence of independent women such as Hosmer, Lander, and Hawthorne’s Miriam. Aligning himself in 1903 with the defensive and culturally conservative postures of Hawthorne and Story, even as he tries to push both of these predecessors into a distant past for the sake of his own cultural identity, James nevertheless affirms those values in ways that manifest their arbitrariness and historical specificity to the patriarchal traditions from which he himself tried to depart in his literary career. In the course of registering his own defensiveness regarding ‘‘the white marmorean flock’’ of women sculptors in Rome, the titillating nudity of neoclassical sculptural figures, and

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the libidinal threats of androgynous characters, such as Hawthorne’s Donatello and Miriam, James reveals his homoerotic desires and lack of interest in merely ‘‘decorative’’ or ‘‘conventional’’ feminine characters, such as Adina Waddington or Martha Valerio—those ‘‘angels in the house’’ produced by the Protestant American imaginary. In response to this frightening but exciting homoerotic passion, James would learn to project his literary identity in a variety of ways, notably into strong feminine characters sharing his own literary and imaginative powers. Ironically, such feminine characters—Isabel Archer, Olive Chancellor, Miriam Rooth, Maisie Farange, Kate Croy, Milly Theale, and Charlotte Stant—would display many of the best qualities of Hawthorne’s Miriam and of her historical models, Hattie Hosmer and Louisa Lander. Nonetheless, James’s imaginary women would also require his literary forms for their completion, thereby constituting an aesthetic identification of author and character that would enable James to sublimate a forbidden homoerosis. Whether or not James was a product, perhaps the inevitable issue, of the sexual repressions resulting from the strict gender divisions of his forebears’ New England culture, as Scott Derrick argues, or he merely tapped into homosexual passions that were an untraceable part of his sexual identity as a writer and a man, I shall not attempt to decide.60 Even when Hawthorne and James are discussing the same artists and artworks, the differences of their cultural eras are eminently clear despite James’s indebtedness to his real and cultural fathers. The anxiety of Hawthorne fixes clearly on the feminine and the dislocations of bourgeois masculinity it threatens. For James, the conflict among homosocial, homosexual, and heterosexual relations is far more evident in his early fiction, such as ‘‘Adina,’’ and aestheticized and thereby psychosexually defended in later work, such as William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Several conclusions can be drawn from these interesting associations in the always fascinating, ever surprising influence of Hawthorne on James. The first is that this specific influence, itself so powerfully inscribed in the subsequent American literary imaginary, has much to tell us about changing sexual, gender, and racial relations in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. culture. Second, we need more sophisticated theories and practical interpretations of how the arts contribute to cultural repression and such related effects as commodification and fetishism. Finally, the extent to which Henry James’s sexual desires—homoerotic, homosexual, ascetic, homosocial, onanistic, heterosexual— contributed to the productive tensions that shape his literary, autobiographical, critical, and historical narratives is worthy of study for what it teaches us about changing cultural values. Our scholarly interest in

James’s sexuality is not, as some have argued recently, merely a projection of our hypersexualized era onto James’s early twentieth century— a ‘‘sexualization of everything,’’ as one critic wearily complains—but instead an effort to comprehend the sexual behaviors and values so crucial to modernity.61

notes 1. John Carlos Rowe, ‘‘Swept Away: Henry James, Margaret Fuller, and ‘The Last of the Valerii,’ ’’ in Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response, ed. James L. Machor (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 32–53. A revised version of this essay is included as chapter 1 in my The Other Henry James (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 38–55. 2. Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, vol. 1 (Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1903), 5. Further references in the text are abbreviated W and include volume and page numbers. 3. Rowe, ‘‘Swept Away,’’ 37– 42, for my account of how James links Fuller and the many legends and artistic representations of Beatrice Cenci that were so popular in the nineteenth century. 4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni, vol. 4 of the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Claude M. Simpson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 464– 65. Further references in the text are abbreviated MF. 5. In his ‘‘Textual Introduction’’ to the Centenary Edition of The Marble Faun, page xlv, Fredson Bowers explains the addition of the 1860 ‘‘Postscript’’ to the romance: ‘‘Shortly after March 16, 1860 . . . , a second printing . . . — called the second edition on the title—was published, containing the added postscript.’’ 6. I am following here the theoretical and historical argument of Scott S. Derrick in Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19thCentury U.S. Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997) that the ‘‘nineteenth century’s ongoing efforts to essentialize and divide men and women on the basis of gender had the consequence of creating extremely powerful bonds between members of the same sex’’ and that a ‘‘powerful desire for the stuff of masculinity,’’ especially when masculinity has been challenged, ‘‘may often create homoerotic desire for the body of the other man as its inevitable by-product’’ (28). Yet, I confess here to hedging my own claims about the power of masculine ideology in the work of producing homoerotic and homosexual desires, much as Derrick himself does when he acknowledges that ‘‘desire for other men may come from other sources, such as a primarily

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homosexual orientation,’’ even if such desire has ‘‘difficulty understanding and expressing itself apart from ideas of aspiration and identification’’ characteristic of nineteenth-century patriarchal masculinity (28–29). The degree to which the differences between Hawthorne’s and James’s responses to women’s rights and independent women are attributable to different historical (and thus ideological) periods and to different sexual orientations of the authors (Derrick treats James’s ‘‘primary orientation’’ as ‘‘almost certainly homosexual’’ and Hawthorne’s ‘‘as primarily heterosexual’’ [29]) can be judged only after close analyses of their respective treatments of similar historical and literary people, places, and things. 7. Rowe, ‘‘Swept Away,’’ 48. 8. The discovery of the Venus de Milo (Aphrodite of Melos) on Melos in 1820 was only one of many spectacular nineteenth-century discoveries of classical marbles and bronzes that gave special impetus to neoclassical sculpture in this period. 9. In what follows, I am indebted generally to the excellent work of Millicent Bell, Hawthorne’s View of the Artist (New York: State University of New York Press, 1962); Rita K. Gollin and John L. Idol, Jr., with the assistance of Sterling K. Eisiminger, Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Knowledge and Uses of the Visual Arts, Contributions in American Studies, No. 99, ed. Robert H. Walker (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991); Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1970); and Adeline Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989). 10. Dolly Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830 –1908 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 134. 11. Hawthorne to William Ticknor ( January 1855), as quoted in Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913), 141. Hawthorne uses his complaint against the popular literary tastes in America to explain his plan to extend his stay in Europe. 12. Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1968), 327. 13. Ibid., 330. 14. Ibid., 333. 15. Ibid., 334. 16. Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, 195. 17. Ibid., 214. 18. Ibid. 19. T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 231, notes that Lander’s refusal ‘‘to respond to the ‘inquiry’’’ did not stop the rumors, which then ‘‘became accepted as commonplace matters of fact, to which Louisa responded likewise with defiance.’’ Herbert connects the Hawthornes’ snubbing of Lander for the hint of sexual scandal with their negative reactions to ‘‘the nudity of the pictures and statues they viewed in Italy’’ and that ‘‘their

minds insistently formed a judgment concerning the sexual interaction between artist and model.’’ 20. For an excellent account of the Hawthornes’ relationship with Maria Louisa Lander, see Robert L. Gale, A Nathaniel Hawthorne Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), 272–73. 21. Herbert, Dearest Beloved, 232. 22. Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 103. Hawthorne makes this reference to Fanny Fern in his letter to his publisher, Ticknor, February 5, 1855, as quoted in Romero, page 103. 23. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 157–58, discuss the influence of the ‘‘growing reticence about sexuality among the middle class’’ on ‘‘American artists of the antebellum period,’’ noting that it was ‘‘acceptable to depict the naked body in European art’’ but that ‘‘those who exhibited in America learned that nudity and sexuality were highly controversial.’’ Of course, such prudishness at home explains why several American sculptors worked in Europe and why several of these chose neoclassical styles and subjects in which nudity was more accepted because conventional and venerable. 24. Craven, Sculpture in America, 268. 25. Ibid., 116. American abolition frequently invoked the long historical struggle against slavery from ancient times to the present and the international goals of abolition. Powers’s sculpture develops the patience and abjection of the classically beautiful feminine figure in the manner of a recognizable Christian pathos, as the cross amid the drapery on the post on which the sculptural figure leans denotes, invoking the sentimentalism used by Stowe, Jacobs, and other antebellum abolitionists to persuade viewers and readers to bring an end to the barbarism of slavery wherever it happened to occur. 26. Craven, Sculpture in America, 277. 27. Ibid., 279. 28. Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, 313. 29. Ibid., 25, 204. Wayman Crow, the father of Hosmer’s friend and classmate Cornelia Crow, ‘‘urged the gradual, voluntary manumission of slaves’’ and gave his own servants their freedom in 1853, ‘‘an act that Hatty applauded when she received the news in Rome’’ (25). 30. Rowe, ‘‘Swept Away,’’ 43– 44, for a discussion of Fuller’s treatment of heroic Greek women. In ‘‘Appendix G. Euripides. Sophocles,’’ Woman in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1971), 197, Fuller adopts the voice of her narrative alter ego, Miranda, to comment on the ‘‘many allusions . . . to characters of women drawn by the Greek dramatists,’’ beginning with an invocation of ‘‘Iphigenia! Antigone!’’ as models for feminine vitality and independence that have been ‘‘dwarfed and defaced’’ by the ‘‘bad nurture’’ of nineteenth-century culture, concluding that ‘‘hearts like yours are in our breasts, living, if unawakened; and our minds are capable of the same resolves.’’ I am reminded in this context of Judith Butler’s recent (May 8, 11,

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12, 1998) Wellek Library Lectures, ‘‘Antigone’s Claim: Kinship, Aberration and Psychoanalysis’’ (a lecture series sponsored by the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California, Irvine), in which Butler reinterpreted Antigone—in Sophocles’ Antigone, in Hegel’s theory of tragedy, and in Lacan’s Seminar XIII—as a feminist and potentially transgendered alternative to the Oedipal family romance. 31. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, vol. 10 of The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1882), 494. Further references in the text are abbreviated FIN. 32. Arlin Turner, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 339. In his Italian Notebook (April 25, 1858), Hawthorne recounts how the sculptor Benjamin Paul Akers ‘‘conducted us to the shop of the jeweller Castellani, who is a great reproducer of ornaments in the old Roman and Etruscan fashion,’’ where the Hawthornes saw a reproduction of ‘‘the toilet-case of an Etruscan lady . . . with her rings for summer and winter, and for every day of the week, and for thumb and fingers; her ivory comb; her bracelets; and more knick-knacks than I can half remember’’ (FIN, 181). 33. William Wetmore Story, Graffiti d’Italia, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1875), 154. 34. Gollin and Idol, Prophetic Pictures, 94. 35. Hawthorne’s image of these neoclassical sculptures burnt to ‘‘quicklime’’ for the sake of preserving the ideal beauty of the classical Venus de Medici recalls, of course, Bartram’s limekiln and the allegorical tale of Ethan Brand’s quest for the Unpardonable Sin in Hawthorne’s ‘‘Ethan Brand’’ (1851). Gollin and Idol, Prophetic Pictures, 185, cite Hawthorne’s comments on Powers’s Greek Slave as part of their excellent section ‘‘Hawthorne’s Comments on Art: A Sampling.’’ 36. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 121: ‘‘The modern terms homosexuality and heterosexuality do not apply to an era that had not yet articulated these distinctions. Only in the late nineteenth century did European and American medical writers apply these categories and stigmatize some same-sex relationships as a form of sexual perversion. Until the 1880s, most romantic friendships were thought to be devoid of sexual content.’’ 37. In the same passage, James elaborates: ‘‘The ‘story’ of the most beautiful of legends is (at least pictorially speaking) not in Andromeda, isolated and divinely bare, but in the mailed and caparisoned Perseus, his glorious gear, his winged horse and helmet and lance’’ (W, 2 : 83). 38. Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872) dates from the very end of the romantic classicism that James recalls in William Wetmore Story and thus figures as an interesting, albeit unintended, commentary on the rationalization of ancient Greek mythic nature worship in the long Enlightenment heritage that stretches from Plato and Aristotle to Kant and Hegel. 39. In the May 22, 1858, entry in his Italian Notebooks, Hawthorne de-

scribes a visit to Frederika Bremer’s house and the tour she conducted of the Tarpeian Rock, a portion of which her Roman garden bordered. Taking her visitors to the garden side of the Rock, she conducts them through her house, into the street, ‘‘into the piazza of the Capitol,’’ and finally to a ‘‘parapet, leaning over which we saw the sheer precipice of the Tarpeian Rock ‘‘(FIN, 215). Bremer (1801–1865) was a popular Swedish novelist who was wellknown in Europe and the United States for her political activism on behalf of women’s rights and antislavery issues. What would otherwise be merely a trivial episode of Roman tourism is in fact full of strange coincidences and significance when read in conjunction with the legends of the Roman Tarpeia, for whom the rock was named; the use of the rock to execute criminals, especially traitors to the state, in ancient Rome; and Hawthorne’s use of the rock as the site of Donatello’s murder of the Model. In the commonest legend of Tarpeia, according to Pierre Grimal’s The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, trans. A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1986), 432–33, she was the daughter of Tarpeius, who had been charged by Romulus to protect the Capitol during the war with the Sabines. While the Sabine king, Tatius, was encamped at the foot of the Capitol, Tarpeia fell in love with him and let him and his troops into Rome on the promise he would marry her. Instead of marrying her, Tatius had her crushed to death beneath the shields of his troops. Thus a treasonous woman, who is herself betrayed, is presumed to originate the Roman practice of hurling traitors from the height of the rock. Bremer’s association with the Tarpeian Rock, even in Hawthorne’s casual fancies as a tourist, suggests that Miriam’s ‘‘mystery’’ involves more than just some sexual scandal, such as Nathalia Wright finds in the amorous triangle and murder mystery involving the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin, his wife, and the governess, Henrette Deluzy-Desportes, as a possible source for Miriam’s mystery (Nathalia Wright, ‘‘Hawthorne and the Praslin Murder,’’ New England Quarterly 15 :1 [March 1942]: 5–14). Along with other extrinsic and intrinsic hints, Bremer’s association with the novel gives credibility to the notion that Hawthorne seriously linked Miriam with the European political revolutions of 1848, again giving some validity to Fuller as a model for her character and her father-inlaw as the ‘‘family’’ member in high places in the Papacy. To be sure, Bremer’s popularity as a novelist might also have provoked a certain envious reaction on Hawthorne’s part, prompting his choice of the Tarpeian Rock for the particular dramatic action in The Marble Faun. 40. Derrick, Monumental Anxieties, 36. 41. Craven, Sculpture in America, 117. Thus ‘‘the ‘Greek Slave’ was to them a greater work of art than the ‘Venus de’ Medici’ [because] it possessed Christian ‘fortitude and resignation’ and faith in the ‘goodness of God,’ in spite of the horrible circumstances in which the young girl found herself. It was perhaps as much due to the literary and philosophical content as to the artistic merits of the statue that it owed its brilliant success’’ (117). 42. Ibid., 281. 43. ‘‘ ‘The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,’

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remarked she.—‘But what a strange efficacy there is in Death! If we cannot all win pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as well. I like this statue, though it is too cold and stern in its moral lesson’’’ (MF, 117). 44. Sheila Teahan, ‘‘The Story in It: William Wetmore Story and His Intertexts,’’ a paper delivered at the Hawthorne Society meeting in Rome ( June 5, 1998), argues that James often treats ironically Story and his career as a sculptor, as well as Story’s numerous (and admittedly tedious) literary works. Teahan’s point does not, however, invalidate my notion that James finds in Story’s sculptures certain useful defenses against social and political changes, such as women’s rights and abolition, which he and many others linked with changing sexual and ethnic mores. 45. Carol Holly, Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 94, suggests that James uses ‘‘his biography of . . . Story’’ as James’s first effort at autobiography, citing aptly Henry Adams’s famous letter to James (November 18, 1903) after reading William Wetmore Story and His Friends: ‘‘You have written not Story’s life, but your own and mine,—pure autobiography.’’ 46. The hand that Count Valerio keeps in a secret cabinet in his study recalls the sculpture of Hilda’s hand that Kenyon shows Miriam in chapter 13 of The Marble Faun, of course, and that Hawthorne specifically notes is based on ‘‘Harriet Hosmer’s clasped hands of Browning and his wife, symbolizing the individuality and heroic union of two high, poetic lives’’ (MF, 120). The single hand Valerio retains from the unearthed classical sculpture of Juno and the single hand of Hilda that Kenyon sculpts in Hawthorne’s romance suggest not only the desire for ‘‘heroic union’’ of the sort that will be represented in the marriage of Hilda and Kenyon at the end of the romance but also the fracture or alienation in contemporary gender relations that makes such ‘‘heroic union’’ so rare or difficult to achieve. There is yet another possible allusion in the hand Kenyon keeps in his own treasure box in The Marble Faun. Hawthorne comments in The French and Italian Notebooks on Hiram Powers’s sculpture of an ‘‘exquisite . . . little baby’s hand,’’ ‘‘delicately represented in the whitest marble,’’ based on Powers’s daughter Luly’s hand: ‘‘‘Luly’s hand,’ Powers called it. . . . The Sculptor made it only for himself and his wife; but so many people, he said, had insisted on having a copy, that there are now forty scattered about the world’’ (FIN, 308). Like bronzed baby shoes in the 1940s and 1950s, sculpted hands, especially of children, became conventions by the 1860s and many other sculptors, including Akers, produced these sentimental sculptures. 47. Robert L. Gale, A Henry James Encyclopedia (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989), 8. 48. Henry James, ‘‘Adina,’’ The Tales of Henry James, ed. Maqbool Aziz, vol. 2: 1870 –1874 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 359. Further references in the text are abbreviated A. 49. For the story of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Isaac, of course, see Genesis 12–23. I am grateful to Professor Sharon Baris of Bar-Ilan University, Ramat

Gan Israel, who was kind enough to provide this gloss for me during our meeting at the Hawthorne Society meeting in Rome. In a subsequent letter, Professor Baris notes that the use of ‘‘Adinah’’ as a proper name is in Hebrew male and associated with David and the tribe of Reuben, as recounted in II Kings 14 : 2 and I Chronicles 11: 42. In Julius Fuerst and Samuel Davidson, A Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament, 5th ed. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1885), 1,016, ‘‘Adinah’’ is defined as ‘‘preparer of sexual pleasure, pleasuregiver, rejoicer.’’ I am grateful to Professor Baris for all of these sources and her interpretive skills. 50. The libretto was written by Felice Romani, who based it on Euge`ne Scribe’s Le philtre. The opera premiered at the Teatro della Canobbiana in Milan on May 12, 1832, and had its American premiere at the Park Theater in New York on May 22, 1844, according to David Ewen, Encyclopedia of the Opera (New York: A. A. Wyn, Inc., 1955), 134. 51. It also echoes the Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah. Rightly fearing that the Egyptians will be dazzled by Sarah’s (then Sarai) beauty, Abraham (then Abram) smuggles her into Egypt hidden in a box. There are, of course, countless myths and legends that allegorize woman’s feminine powers as a secret contained in a box or casket, which is what makes the scene of discovery in ‘‘Adina’’ so oddly evocative. 52. When Scrope and the narrator first examine the stone, the latter says he ‘‘bent my nose over it’’ and describes it as ‘‘about the size of a small hen’segg, of a dull brown colour, stained and encrusted by long burial, and deeply corrugated on one surface’’ (A, 352). 53. Pierre Walker, ‘‘ ‘Adina’: Henry James’s Roman Allegory of Power and the Representation of the Foreign,’’ Henry James Review 21:1 (Winter 2000): 16–20, convincingly points to several allusions in ‘‘Adina’’ to Wagner’s Der Ring des Nieblungen. Although Wagner’s operatic cycle was not staged until 1876, two years after ‘‘Adina’’ was published, the cycle had been published in 1863. Walker makes important connections between the magic ring in Wagner’s opera and James’s use of the topaz intaglio in ‘‘Adina.’’ 54. Herbert, Dearest Beloved, 226. 55. Fred Kaplan, Henry James, The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (New York: William Morrow and Co., Inc., 1992), 145. At the time, James was ‘‘renting a horse by the month.’’ Harriet Hosmer was well-known for her ‘‘skill at riding’’ and for her independence as one of the few American women to keep a horse for her personal use. Herbert, Dearest Beloved, 236, refers to Hosmer’s riding and quotes Hawthorne’s uneasiness at witnessing ‘‘the spectacle of a peasant-woman riding on horseback astride,’’ creating in Herbert’s interpretation a ‘‘sexually charged gender anomaly’’ of the woman rider grasping the horse ‘‘between the rider’s legs.’’ 56. Henry James, ‘‘Roman Rides,’’ in Italian Hours (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), 234. This travel essay was first published by James in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1873, reprinted in Transatlantic Sketches (1875), and finally collected in Italian Hours (1909).

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57. William Wetmore Story, Nero (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1875), is dedicated to the actress Fanny Kemble, whom James also notes was in the company that night listening to Story’s reading. In that dedication, Story characterizes the period of Nero’s rule as one of ‘‘cruelties and crimes which would not now be tolerated, and by passions so violent and unrestrained, that they seem to bear the taint of insanity,’’ suggesting a progressive scheme for Western civilization stretching from the ‘‘decline’’ of the Roman Empire to the dawn of the new American imperium in Story’s own age (vi). 58. Adina’s ‘‘conversion’’ and ‘‘marriage’’ to Angelo are scenically represented for the narrator in his accidental encounter with her in a ‘‘Capuchin convent at the edge of the Alban lake,’’ where he finds her staring fixedly and strangely ‘‘on the shining altar’’ (A, 373). The Model in The Marble Faun, of course, turns out to be a Capuchin emissary of whatever Roman official or family member has a claim on Miriam, and the Model’s murder by Donatello, albeit himself nominally Catholic, seems to enact symbolically a conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism. Such echoes of Hawthorne play about the dramatic action of James’s ‘‘Adina.’’ 59. Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 183, argues that in The Marble Faun ‘‘Hawthorne asks the reader to accept the kept secrets in the novel’’ and concludes that ‘‘art without sympathetic apprehension is incomplete.’’ James is producing sympathy in the reader by way of a similar technique of withholding a secret and then asking the reader to keep that secret for him. 60. Derrick, Monumental Anxieties, 29. 61. Lee J. Siegel’s omnibus review of recent books in queer theory and gay studies, ‘‘The Gay Science: Queer Theory, Literature, and the Sexualization of Everything,’’ New Republic 219 :19 (November 9, 1998): 30 – 42, complains of this ‘‘sexualization of everything’’ as a consequence of these approaches that somehow interferes with, even destroys, our appreciation of literature. What is troubling about the backlash represented by Siegel’s review-essay is her claim that the discussion of homosexuality somehow ‘‘sexualizes everything,’’ implying thereby that gay studies and queer theory can think of nothing other than ‘‘sex.’’ This claim is obviously false, but it reveals a homophobia that goes far beyond the demonization of same-sex relationships to encompass scholarly investigations of modern sexuality, especially in the artistic and intellectual traditions of the humanities.

Leland S. Person

falling into heterosexuality sculpting male bodies in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson

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I have noticed that those who are observant of beauty only in women, and are moved little or not at all by the beauty of men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. johann wincklemann in walter pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry

Sculpture is ‘‘work for men,’’ Mary Garland insists to Rowland Mallet in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson, and I want to explore several questions about manliness and male sexuality that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s and James’s interest in sculpture raise— questions especially about the representation of male bodies and their display to male viewers.1 The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson were published fifteen years apart—in 1860 and 1875, respectively—and there is no doubt that James’s novel, despite James’s determined effort to distance himself from his predecessor, was influenced by Hawthorne’s. But I am less interested in questions of Hawthorne’s influence on James than in questions of mutual influence: on the two writers’ relation to nineteenth-century discourses of masculinity, embodiment, and desire— on the subject-object relation, through the medium of sculpture, between men and other male bodies. I want to begin, however, with two passages in which Hawthorne and James rather extravagantly address the connection between sculpture and embodiment. The first comes from Hawthorne’s Italian notebook and describes his visit to the studio of American sculptor Hiram Powers in Florence in 1858:

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Powers took us into the farthest room, I believe, of his very extensive studio, and showed us a statue of Washington that has much dignity and stateliness; he expressed, however, great contempt for the coat and breeches, and masonic emblems, in which he had been required to drape the figure. What the devil would the man do with Washington, the most decorous and respectable personage that ever went ceremoniously through the realities of life! Did anybody ever see Washington naked! It is inconceivable. He had no nakedness, but, I imagine, was born with his clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world. His costume, at all events, was a part of his character, and must be dealt with by whatever sculptor undertakes to represent him. I wonder that so very sensible a man as Powers should not see the necessity of accepting drapery; and the very drapery of the day, if he will keep his art alive. It is his business to idealize the tailor’s actual work. But he seems to be especially fond of nudity, none of his ideal statues—so far as I know them—having so much as a rag of clothes.2

When James reviewed Passages from the French and Italian Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1872, he criticized Hawthorne’s fussy responses to Italian sculpture. Hawthorne ‘‘remains unreconciled to the nudity of the marbles,’’ James insisted. He was ‘‘not, we take it, without taste; but his taste was not robust.’’ 3 James of course went out of his way in this review, and later in his book on Hawthorne (in 1879), to emphasize his predecessor’s limitations and his own superior taste and tolerance— even for nudity. In the longer critical study he cites Hawthorne’s ‘‘aversion to the representation of the nude in sculpture’’ as evidence that he lacked the ‘‘plastic sense.’’ He ‘‘apparently quite failed to see,’’ James concludes, ‘‘that nudity is not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan ancestry.’’ 4 Flash forward to 1906 and a letter James wrote to sculptor Hendrik Andersen, the young sculptor he had met in Rome in 1899 and with whom he had immediately grown infatuated. Andersen was betting his career on the marketability of big nude sculptures, and he had apparently sent James photos of a recent production of two lovers kissing. ‘‘I don’t think I find the hands, on the backs, living enough and participant enough in the kiss,’’ James responded. They would be, in life, very participant—to their fingertips, and would show it in many ways. But this you know, and the thing is very

strong and (otherwise) complete. There is more flesh and pulp in it, more life of surface and of blood-flow under the surface, than you have hitherto, in your powerful simplifications, gone in for. So keep at that—at the flesh and the devil and the rest of it; make the creatures palpitate, and their flesh tingle and flush, and their internal economy proceed, and their bellies ache and their bladders fill—all in the mystery of your art.’’ 5

These two passages obviously suggest very different sculptural values—not to mention different feelings about bodies, clothes, and nakedness. Hawthorne wants his figures draped, with no hint of an underlying nakedness. James renders clothing all but invisible as he penetrates to the guts under the surface. Hawthorne recoils before the sculptured nudes he encountered in Italy. James seems to celebrate nudity and the physical messiness of bodies— enough so that Eve Sedgwick has suggested that ‘‘much of James’s strongest writing is necessarily, as it were already, to be in thrall to what had long been his painful, fussy, immensely productive focus on the sensations, actions, and paralyses, accumulations and probings and expulsions of his lower digestive tract.’’ 6 Whereas Hawthorne stresses the constructedness of the male body in terms suggesting his sensitivity to historical particulars, James emphasizes naturalness and a virtually ahistorical ‘‘essence.’’ Finally, as they triangulate relationships between men through the medium of sculpted bodies, both scenes express and repress homoerotic and homo-aesthetic desire. Given the many occasions in his letters where James imagines putting his hands on the young men to whom he expressed often extraordinary affection, his letter to Andersen, with only slight indirection, clearly uses sculpture as a third party through which he can express his desire to participate to his ‘‘fingertips’’ in a passionate kiss.7 Hawthorne in contrast represses the homoerotic and homo-aesthetic—but so emphatically that the passage fairly bristles with the possibility. Preferring the draped Washington and refusing so pointedly to imagine him naked, especially in the context of Hiram Powers’s desire to rip off Washington’s clothes, serves Hawthorne as the proverbial pink elephant—making male nakedness displayed to other men the very last thing he cannot imagine. As Hawthorne himself wondered, ‘‘What the devil would the man do with Washington?’’ My interest in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson goes beyond their similarities and the influence that James tried to mask. The two novels are situated at important moments in the history of nineteenth-century constructions of gender and sexual identities. While the Oscar Wilde trials of the 1890s crystallized constructs of gay male identity and gay

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subjectivity, novels published in 1860 and 1875 would have had more difficulty in discovering terms for male-to-male relationships. To rephrase Hawthorne’s question in the critical terms that interest me here, What could a man in 1858 or in 1874 imagine doing with the naked body of a president or even with a sculpted replica of a naked man? What language was available to Hawthorne and James for mediating or constructing responses to male nakedness? More specifically, when deciding to base a narrative on sculptors who, among other things, represent and display the bodies of naked men to other men, what sort of story can Hawthorne and James imagine writing? Published in 1873, Walter Pater’s The Renaissance is situated between The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson, and Pater’s unabashed celebration of Greek sculpture and naked male figures certainly helped to authorize James’s own viewing of male nudes—and helps account for the condescending attitude he takes toward Hawthorne’s puritanical viewing tastes. Richard Ellmann and Eric Savoy have convincingly demonstrated James’s intimate knowledge of Pater’s writing, as well as his efforts to disguise it, and I want to measure both American writers’ representation of male nudes against Pater’s ecstatic example because doing so will help us understand the complex formation of spectatorial values, particularly as they mediate male-to-male viewing practices.8 Although Pater’s example has little relevance for Hawthorne, except as it highlights the nuanced language Hawthorne lacked, it bears directly on James, who can be situated between Pater’s arguably gay celebrations and what we now might call Hawthorne’s panic. Attitudes toward sculpted nudity changed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as preferences for male nudes gave way before preferences for female nudes, and that change in taste occurred at the same time that proscriptions against homoerotic behavior between men and the tendency to derive male subjectivity and male identity from sexual behavior both increased. The result, which sculptural representation and speculation can illustrate particularly well, is a reorientation of the male gaze and its significance, at least when the gaze figures relationships between men and sculpted male bodies. Joy Kasson has brilliantly examined Hiram Powers’s famous Greek Slave (see page 79) within a framework of what she calls ‘‘Narratives of the Female Body,’’ but she and other critics assume that the sculptural gaze is male and takes sculpted women as its object.9 In this essay, however, I want to investigate narratives of the male body that arise through the spectatorial agency of male-to-male gazing. What the devil would a man do with the sculpted body of another man?

More than Victorian prudishness before the ‘‘apotheosis of nudity’’ he discovered in Italy (FIN, 111), Hawthorne’s anxiety before Powers’s Washington has its origins, I think, in the way he thinks about sculpture—in his preference for clay over marble. A sculptor has very little to do with ‘‘actually chiseling the marble,’’ he comments in The Marble Faun.10 The ‘‘exquisitely designed shape of clay,’’ in fact, is ‘‘more interesting than even the final marble, as being the intimate production of the sculptor himself, moulded throughout with his loving hands, and nearest to his imagination and heart’’ (MF, 114). Miriam comments that she will not touch clay because it is ‘‘earthy and human’’ (MF, 116), and sculpture fascinates and frightens Hawthorne, I think, because it offers such a sensual, hands-on experience of mortal embodiment. The Model’s death that forms an early climax in The Marble Faun represents a morbid reversal of this creative process—the disintegration of a male body into a mass or ‘‘heap’’ of raw material—and I think Hawthorne felt haunted by this possibility and image, an ultimate nakedness and abjectness that he felt loath to touch. Were you not afraid to touch your clay model of Cleopatra, Miriam asks Kenyon during her visit to his studio, ‘‘as she grew more and more towards hot life, beneath your hand?’’ (MF, 127).11 The specter Powers’s Washington raises for Hawthorne, I want to suggest, involves just this sort of ‘‘intimate production’’—the play of the sculptor’s hands over a man’s rather than a woman’s naked body, perhaps even bringing the father of our country ‘‘more and more towards hot life’’ beneath his hand. The result, it is tempting to suggest, is an early form of homosexual panic. As Kenyon will later explain to Miriam, when she accuses him of taking Donatello away from her, ‘‘I am a man, and, between man and man, there is always an insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other’s hands; and therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart-sustenance, from his brother man’’ (MF, 285). Although none of Powers’s full-length sculptures of George Washington survives, comparing the plaster cast for one of them with Powers’s statues of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and with Horatio Greenough’s notorious half-draped Washington (see page 94) illustrates the spectatorial issue Hawthorne faced. Greenough could imagine Washington half-naked, while Powers’s idealized statues of Jefferson and Franklin help us visualize the draped version of Washington that Hawthorne actually saw. The plaster cast of Washington, complete with fig leaf, however, makes clear the male embodiment that Hawthorne was trying hard not to imagine in Powers’s Florentine studio.12 Hawthorne’s encounter with Powers’s sculpture of Washington, as well as his represen-

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tation of sculptured masculinity in The Marble Faun, raises in a particularly striking way critical questions about male-to-male relationships and how such relationships could be embodied and translated into narrative in nineteenth-century literature. Examining the tacit conversation between Hawthorne and James, The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson, on the subject of male sculptural embodiment and its display to the male gaze, furthermore, will highlight conspicuous changes in the male imaginary during the latter half of the century. Hawthorne more commonly emphasized sculpture’s power to freeze and purify bodies, as in Coverdale’s reference in The Blithedale Romance to the ‘‘cold decorum of the marble,’’ a figure he uses to contain his thoughts of Zenobia, whose ‘‘flesh-warmth’’ and ‘‘full bust’’—her ‘‘womanliness incarnated’’— cause him to close his eyes, ‘‘as if it were not quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her.’’ 13 Hawthorne praised Powers’s statue California, which he found ‘‘as naked as Venus,’’ precisely because she was ‘‘not an actual woman, capable of exciting passion, but evidently a little out of the category of human nature’’ (FIN, 281). Similarly, in The Marble Faun Hawthorne asserts that marble assumes a ‘‘sacred character’’ and ‘‘no man should dare to touch it unless he feels within himself a certain consecration and a priesthood’’ (MF, 136). Despite her admiration for Kenyon’s passionate Cleopatra, Miriam claims that he considers sculpture a ‘‘frozen art’’ and ‘‘fossilizing process.’’ ‘‘You turn feverish men,’’ she accuses him, ‘‘into cool, quiet marble’’ (MF, 119). Although Hiram Powers, plaster study for statue of Jonathan Auerbach terms sculpture in George Washington, 1858. The Marble Faun a ‘‘cold, masculine medium’’ and considers Hawthorne’s use of it ‘‘too rigid’’ in its allegory to ‘‘convey suggestiveness,’’ the ‘‘fossilizing’’ tendency to freeze feverish men and to stabilize human forms, gender identities, and desires often fails.14 Frederick Crews argues that ‘‘the book deals in an oxymoronic marriage of marble and faun, of cold artistic stasis and the raw passion which it imprisons,’’ whereas Nina Baym says that The Marble Faun ‘‘postulates art as the expression of an erotic counterforce to civilization, and chronicles the struggle between them.’’ 15 Miriam herself acknowl-

edges the transgressive erotic power of art even as she echoes Hawthorne’s notebook commentary on nudity in sculpture. ‘‘Now-a-days people are as good as born in their clothes,’’ she says, ‘‘and there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore,— as you must candidly confess,— cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances’’ (MF, 123). A variation on the erotic-aesthetic concern for the sculptor’s ‘‘hot’’ touch, this anxiety involves a failure of representation—a fear that the ‘‘cold decorum of marble’’ cannot distract the sculptor’s attention from the ‘‘real thing’’ before his gaze. In both cases, Hawthorne’s anxiety expresses the tendency of bodies, Galatea-like, to displace their representations. Kenyon’s prized possession, we recall, is a sculpted replica of Hilda’s ‘‘small, beautifully shaped hand,’’ but even this decorous prosthesis, which Kenyon dares not kiss (MF, 122), won’t reside inertly within the cold decorum of the marble. ‘‘Touching those lovely fingers—had the jealous sculptor allowed you to touch—you could hardly believe that a virgin warmth would not steal from them into your heart’’ (MF, 120). Hawthorne’s conflicted attitude is nowhere better—more confusingly— expressed than in his comments about an English sculptor ( John Gibson) who has spent forty years in ‘‘making Venuses, Cupids, Bacchuses, and a vast deal of other marble progeny of dreamwork.’’ Forgoing ‘‘Christian reality,’’ he has ‘‘perverted himself into a Pagan idealist’’ (MF, 134); ‘‘loving and reverencing the pure material in which he wrought, as surely this admirable sculptor did, he had nevertheless robbed the marble of its chastity, by giving it an artificial warmth of hue. Thus it became a sin and shame to look at his nude goddesses. They had revealed themselves to his imagination, no doubt, with all their deity about them; but, bedaubed with buff-colour, they stood forth to the eyes of the profane in the guise of naked women’’ (MF, 134–35). In expressing such Pygmalion-like anxieties about Gibson’s power to make nude goddesses come to life as naked women, Hawthorne was both playing upon the common distinction between nudity and nakedness and registering the fear that the male gaze could not contain feverish women despite the mediation of sculpture. In his notebook comments on Gibson’s Tinted Venus, Hawthorne registers more internal conflict, acknowledging ‘‘something fascinating and delectable in the warm, yet delicate tint of the beautiful nude Venus,’’ wondering whether he ‘‘should not, in the end, like the snowy whiteness better for the whole statue,’’ and then concluding that the ‘‘lascivious warmth of hue quite demoralizes the chastity of the marble, and makes one ashamed to look at the naked limbs in the company of

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Left, Farnese Hercules; right, Praxiteles Faun. women’’ (MF, 157). Hawthorne depends on the pure whiteness of Carrara marble to abstract sculpted objects from their models—from bodies—and to shift them into a transcendental realm. Coloring ‘‘nude goddesses’’ threatens to close that spectatorial gap and force Hawthorne to see ‘‘naked women,’’ such as Gibson’s Tinted Venus.16 As William Gerdts explains, color ‘‘violated the concept of abstraction, which was one of the justifications for sculptural nudity’’; nudity was ‘‘acceptable as long as sensuality was sublimated—suggested at second hand through the purity of virginally white marble.’’ 17 The case of the marble faun, moreover, raises the stakes even further, threatening to dissolve the difference between statue and body altogether and to provide the experience I mentioned at the outset—the firsthand experience of another man’s body. In confusing the boundaries between art and life, statues and men,

in his depiction of the marble faun, Hawthorne plays dangerously with possibilities he had foreclosed in his response to Powers’s Washington. Fondling clay is one thing; fondling clay that embodies a man, or a statue that has come to life as man, is another. Not surprisingly, in view of her otherwise transgressive role in the novel, Miriam first suggests that the distinction between real and marble men cannot so easily be maintained. Remarking the resemblance between Donatello and the Faun of Praxiteles, she judges that the ‘‘portraiture is perfect in character, sentiment, and feature. If it were a picture, the resemblance might be half-illusive and imaginary; but here, in this Pentelic marble, it is a substantial fact, and may be tested by absolute touch and measurement’’ (MF, 7). Hawthorne goes on in his own voice—the voice of his notebook directly transcribed into the novel—to affirm that Donatello ‘‘might have figured perfectly as the marble Faun, miraculously softened into flesh and blood’’ (MF, 8). The Faun is the ‘‘marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on the trunk or stump of a tree,’’ he observes; one hand hangs carelessly by his side; in the other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan instrument of music. His only garment—a lion’s skin, with the claw upon his shoulder—falls half-way down his back, leaving the limbs and entire front of the figure nude. The form, thus displayed, is marvellously graceful, but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more flesh, and less of heroic muscle, than the old sculptors were wont to assign to their types of masculine beauty. The character of the face corresponds with the figure; it is most agreeable in outline and feature, but rounded, and somewhat voluptuously developed, especially about the throat and chin; the nose is almost straight, but very slightly curves inward, thereby acquiring an indescribable charm of geniality and humour. The mouth, with its full, yet delicate lips, seems so nearly to smile outright, that it calls forth a responsive smile. The whole statue—unlike anything else that ever was wrought in that severe material of marble— conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual creature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone image without conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its substance were warm to the touch, and imbued with actual life. It comes very close to some of our pleasantest sympathies. (MF, 8– 9)

Unlike the play of desire that Hawthorne carefully checks as he contemplates Powers’s statue of Washington, the play of male desire across the surface of the marble faun carries an animating, eroticizing power and,

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surprisingly for an author who preferred ‘‘neutral territories,’’ raises the prospect of a barely mediated tactile experience—the possibility of ‘‘absolute touch.’’ The act of gazing activates a ‘‘kindly sentiment’’ that renders the statue ‘‘warm to the touch’’; the man of marble becomes ‘‘imbued with actual life’’ through the power of male desire. Hawthorne finds himself in a hard position—Pygmalion’s, except for the gender difference of his Galatea-like object—and he works to contain this animating impulse. His description of the Faun and his emphasis on its lifelikeness anticipates Pater’s celebratory scrutiny of sculpted male bodies and their ‘‘physical perfection’’ in ‘‘The Age of Athletic Prizemen.’’ Praising the artist’s ‘‘mastery of natural detail,’’ which he terms a ‘‘veritable counterfeit of nature,’’ Pater dwells on physical details— ‘‘the very turn and texture of the crisp locks,’’ the ‘‘very feel of the tense nerve and full-flushed vein,’’ the expanding bosom and parting lips of Landas—in terms that recall James’s advice to Hendrik Andersen, as well as Hawthorne’s description of the Praxiteles Faun.18 The marble faun, furthermore, also embodies coarseness and physicality, a male body unrestrained by clothing or manner and possessing a ‘‘capacity for strong and warm attachment’’ (MF, 9). Hawthorne marvels at the sculptor’s ‘‘rare artistic skill’’ and ‘‘delicate taste’’—the way he managed the obvious tension between desire and representation, letting loose his imagination to dream ‘‘a Faun in this guise’’ but then succeeding in ‘‘imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing, in marble.’’ ‘‘Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster,’’ Hawthorne concludes, ‘‘but a being in whom both races meet, on friendly ground’’ (MF, 10). Working strenuously, I think, to portray the Faun as another ‘‘neutral territory,’’ Hawthorne’s best effort produces a male body that reflects an uneasy truce between desire and its expression—a prison house of desire, sportive and frisky, that threatens to burst forth a monster. The Faun might be considered a neutral territory in another respect as well. For in displaying a ‘‘graceful’’ and ‘‘more rounded outline,’’ and less ‘‘heroic muscle’’ than the classical model of masculine beauty would predict, the Praxiteles Faun seems to occupy a place somewhere between conventional genders. Abigail Solomon-Godeau explicitly links the Praxiteles Faun with a tradition of representing ephebic manhood, and she illustrates the point by juxtaposing the Faun and the Farnese Hercules, which excessively embodies an opposite tradition— of virile, dominating masculinity.19 Hawthorne understood the implications of this contrast of male body types, because he himself had employed it in juxtaposing Owen Warland and Robert Danforth in ‘‘The Artist of the Beautiful,’’ as well as Coverdale and Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance. He seems initially more comfortable with the ephebic ideal in

The Marble Faun, naturalizing it in the observation that the Faun represents a ‘‘poet’s reminiscence of a period when man’s affinity with Nature was more strict, and his fellowship with every living thing more intimate and dear’’ (MF, 11). Indeed, the Faun is transgendered enough that when Hawthorne first saw the statue and recorded his response in his notebook, he imagined himself incarnating the Faun’s fascinating combination of characteristics ‘‘in the person of a young lady’’ (FIN, 179). Transcribing such a transgendered male body into narrative and bringing it to life raises significant questions about ‘‘natural’’ manhood precisely where the male body and the male gaze intersect because male desire has the power to engender the male viewer. Given his many available choices, Hawthorne’s decision to use the Praxiteles Faun as the source for his novel is interesting for other reasons as well. According to Oscar Wilde’s recent biographer, Gary Schmidgall, Wilde was given to calling ‘‘fauns’’ those boys whom he found appealing, and Wilde’s ‘‘The Young King’’ (1898) includes a comparison of the ‘‘wildeyed’’ hero to a ‘‘brown woodland Faun.’’ 20 Hawthorne wrote well before Wilde, and it is not clear that he would have identified fauns with male-male desire and ‘‘Greek Love.’’ It is clear, however, as we examine the range of choices Hawthorne had available, that his choice of the Praxiteles Faun implicates him in a tradition of male embodiment that includes intimate and erotic relationships. Even though Hawthorne also wrote before Walter Pater and thus before Pater made it virtually impossible for the male spectator to gaze at sculpted male bodies without testing the possibility of male-male desire, he was ‘‘moved’’ by The Red Faun. the sculpted ‘‘beauty of men’’ during his Roman holiday. The question Hawthorne faced, and that we face as critics, is what to make of this attraction. In what terms could Hawthorne deal with his attraction to men’s bodies in 1859 and 1860? Art historians agree that the Praxiteles Faun represents a comparatively androgynous figure of manhood, especially when compared with other fauns. Hawthorne mentions The Red Faun, also at the Capitoline Mu-

seum, and clearly embodies a more virile masculinity. It is not clear whether Hawthorne knew the notorious Barberini Faun, although he certainly could have been familiar with some reproduction. Harriet Hosmer, whose work Hawthorne admired and mentioned in his preface to The Marble Faun, undoubtedly did know the Barberini Faun and probably used it, along with Hawthorne’s Donatello, as a model for her own Sleeping Faun, whose posture and body type do suggest a synthesis of object positions with the capacity for reconfiguring male subjectivity.21 Nancy Bentley has brilliantly analyzed Hawthorne’s exploration of primitivism and its connection to American racial issues in the 1860s, and I would like to build upon her insights by examining Hawthorne’s interest in Donatello’s ‘‘naturalism,’’ especially in the Hellenic context I have developed—what it means for him to reminisce about a period and a condition in which ‘‘man’s affinity with nature was more strict.’’ 22 It is hard to imagine a man less constructed—less like Powers’s Washington—than Donatello as he appears early in The Marble Faun. In contrast to Washington, Donatello seems a naked and natural man. As Kenyon puts it, ‘‘Nature needed, and still needs, this beautiful creature, standing betwixt man and animal, sympathizing with each, comprehending the speech of either race, and interpreting the whole existence of one to the other’’ (MF, 13). Or, in Miriam’s terms: ‘‘How happy, how genial, how satisfactory would be Barberini Faun. his life, enjoying the warm, sensuous, earthy side of nature; revelling in the merriment of woods and streams; living as our four-footed kindreddo— as mankind did in its innocent childhood, before sin, sorrow, or morality itself had ever been thought of!’’ (MF, 13). Aside from the obvious Edenic reference in his story of a Fortunate Fall, both statements suggest more particular references, especially in the context of sculpture that I am developing. ‘‘So full of animal life,’’ ‘‘so physically well-developed,’’ ‘‘exacting no strict obedience to conventional rules’’ (MF, 77), Donatello is no marble faun. His ‘‘natural’’ condition suggests a man still in the clay, albeit possessed of various transgressive powers. Hawthorne plays coy, for example, in his description of Donatello’s ears and ‘‘caudal

Harriet Hosmer, Sleeping Faun, 1865. appendage.’’ The ‘‘mute mystery’’ that Praxiteles has ‘‘diffused’’ throughout his work makes determining the precise species of the Faun problematic. Because the Faun’s tail is hidden by the lion’s skin, the furry ears represent ‘‘the sole indications of his wild, forest nature’’ (MF, 10). The denotative ambiguity Hawthorne establishes—the difficulty of interpreting Donatello’s species—renders other signs of Donatello’s identity ambiguous. Consider his gambols on the Villa Borghese grounds, surely one of the most comical scenes Hawthorne ever wrote. Donatello ‘‘drank in the natural influences of the scene,’’ he observes, and in a ‘‘sudden rapture, he embraced the trunk of a sturdy tree, and seemed to imagine it a creature worthy of affection and capable of a tender response; he clasped it closely in his arms, as a Faun might have clasped the warm feminine grace of the Nymph, whom antiquity supposed to dwell within that rough, encircling rind’’ (MF, 74). Hawthorne brings Bernini’s sculpture Apollo Chasing Daphne to life in this scene, advancing the ‘‘narrative’’ a few moments so that his male character can actually embrace his object. Tree-hugger extraordinaire, Donatello is not even botanically monogamous; his ‘‘instincts’’ proliferate, polymorphously perverse, as he throws himself ‘‘at full length on the turf, and pressed down his lips, kissing the violets and daisies, which kissed him

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back again, though shyly, in their maiden fashion’’ (MF, 74). Hawthorne heterosexualizes this scene, to be sure, even though Donatello’s playful eroticism seems unrestricted in its object choices, and he goes on to illustrate Donatello’s infectious influence on Miriam. ‘‘How close he stands to nature!’’ she exclaims. ‘‘He shall make me as natural as himself—for this one hour’’ (MF, 83). The result of such a reversion to the natural is a brief, Edenic romp ‘‘together like children’’ (MF, 83) that Hawthorne considers ‘‘worth putting into marble’’ (MF, 85), but as he measures such a moment against the contours of his artistic media, he opts for a different emphasis: ‘‘Here, as it seemed, had the Golden Age come back again, within the precincts of this sunny glade; thawing mankind out of their cold formalities; releasing them from irksome restraint’’ (MF, 88). Admittedly, it is not clear how much Hawthorne can imagine ‘‘naturalness’’ including. Donatello obviously loves Miriam even before his ‘‘fall.’’ My point is simply that Hawthorne could imagine a wider variety of love object choices than Donatello’s eventual restriction to Miriam will allow. He seems taken with the possibility of enjoying the sort of polymorphous desire that he had encountered, for example, in the ‘‘Squeeze of the Hand’’ chapter of Melville’s Moby-Dick. Having posited Donatello’s polymorphous naturalness, Hawthorne emphasizes how Donatello’s later experience, especially his murder of Miriam’s Model, reconstructs him as a man who represses such natural pleasure. Shortly after the murder, for example, Kenyon notices Donatello’s ‘‘newly acquired power of dealing with his own emotions, and, after a struggle more or less fierce, thrusting them down into the prison-cells where he usually kept them confined’’ (MF, 250). At the moment of transformation, Donatello’s body ‘‘seemed to have dilated’’ and his eyes blaze with ‘‘fierce energy’’; he is ‘‘kindled’’ into a man whose murderous rage toward another man replaces the polymorphous passion we have seen (MF, 172). In killing the Model, however, Donatello trades positions with him. Donatello ceases to resemble the Praxiteles Faun; the Model becomes ‘‘stone dead,’’ a ‘‘dark mass,’’ or ‘‘heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance’’ (MF, 173). When Miriam sees him laid out in the Capuchin Church, he is a ‘‘form of clay’’ (MF, 192). Simultaneously, Hawthorne imagines a tie closer than the ‘‘marriage-bond’’—the result of this criminal transgression—and a sympathy that ‘‘annihilated all other ties’’ (MF, 174). Hawthorne has imagined a case of spontaneous masculinization, a bodybuilder’s dream or nightmare—a Clark Kent–to–Superman resculpturing of the male body through the subjective agency of heterosexual desire, which erupts in a violent, homosocial form. The ephebic Donatello has grown up, and his body suddenly embodies the masculine difference.

Although most critics understandably emphasize the moral aspects of ‘‘The Faun’s Transformation’’ (the title Hawthorne gives to this pivotal chapter), Hawthorne also represents a psychological and physical metamorphosis predicated on a violent intersection of gender and sexuality. Hawthorne does not represent a closeted homoeroticism in Donatello so much as he explores a male subjectivity not constructed in relation to any gendered object until, that is, the traumatic scene on the Tarpeian Rock—a scene in which Donatello’s effervescent sexuality is heterosexualized with a vengeance via the triangulation that Miriam’s gaze enforces. In the terms Eve Sedgwick uses to define the homosocial and heterosexual, the moment of Donatello’s transformation in The Marble Faun might be considered the perfect primal scene. Donatello falls into heterosexuality in the act of murdering another man—violently repressing the possibility of homoerotic desire and so transforming himself into a man who instantaneously enjoys a ‘‘union,’’ born in passion, ‘‘cemented with blood,’’ and marked by increasing ‘‘loathsomeness’’ (MF, 175), with the woman for whom he has killed this other man. Hawthorne’s tentative exploration of polymorphous and homoerotic desire does not end with Donatello’s transformation, however, because he continues to interest himself in Kenyon’s personal and artistic relationship with the Faun. Although it has been more common to focus on Kenyon’s sculpture of Cleopatra or his replica of Hilda’s hand in order to examine connections between (hetero)sexuality and art in The Marble Faun, I want to turn to the scene at Monte Beni in which Kenyon fulfills his desire to sculpt Donatello’s bust, because as a scene of a man sculpting a man it fully illustrates the issues I have been exploring. An extraordinary representation of mind-body dualism, Donatello’s bust operates like a prosthesis, a second, replicated head. Although Sharon Cameron has demonstrated that Hawthorne typically divides bodies into parts as he explores the question of ‘‘how the body is related to itself,’’ in this case, despite the act of decapitation that separates Donatello’s head from his body, Kenyon’s purpose is to make the prosthetic head fit that body—to solve the sticky problem of relating the ‘‘moist, brown clay’’ and the ‘‘features of Donatello’’ (MF, 271), the problem Hawthorne confronted in the shape of Hiram Powers’s Washington.23 Kenyon struggles manfully, despite ‘‘brooding much and often upon his host’s personal characteristics’’ (MF, 270), precisely because Donatello’s ‘‘inner man’’ (MF, 271) seems so fluid and protean—so resistant to the sort of fossilizing representation or construction that sculpture portends. Not only can Kenyon not make the countenance the ‘‘index of the mind within’’; he cannot even catch a glimpse of a ‘‘genuine and permanent trait’’ (MF, 270). In desperation, Kenyon surrenders con-

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scious control over the creative process, simply letting his hands ‘‘work, uncontrolled, with the clay,’’ flattering himself that the ‘‘true image of his friend was about to emerge.’’ Even this doesn’t work right away; the result to Donatello’s perception is ‘‘like looking a stranger in the face’’ (MF, 271). Only when Kenyon falls into a ‘‘passion with the stubborn image, and cared not what might happen to it,’’ does he succeed. He ‘‘compressed, elongated, widened, and otherwise altered the features of the bust, in mere recklessness,’’ until Donatello, catching his hand, cries out, ‘‘Stop! . . . Let it remain so!’’ (MF, 272). Millicent Bell calls Donatello’s bust a ‘‘magic statue’’ because it successively represents his ‘‘past and future developments as a moral being,’’ but I am more interested in the climax of the process—in this homo-aesthetic orgasm that might be compared with Melville’s ‘‘Squeeze of the Hand’’ for its representation of male ecstasy and climax, a laying on of hands in a play of passion that massages another man’s body until he cries out in pleasure and self-recognition.24 But here, it is with a perverse twist because in his ‘‘accidental handling of the clay, entirely independent of his own will,’’ Kenyon has given the face a ‘‘distorted and violent look, combining animal fierceness with intelligent hatred’’ (MF, 272). He has recreated the expression that Miriam and Hilda ‘‘beheld at that terrible moment’’ when Donatello held the Model over the verge of the Tarpeian Rock. What Kenyon brings forth, in other words, is an erotically charged Donatello, but constructed heterosexually through Miriam’s desiring gaze into a homosocial and jealous lover who, almost immediately, repudiates heterosexual desire because of the guilt he feels over violating another man. That act of sculpture—a morbid reversal of creative energy—reduces the other man to clay even as it hardens Donatello’s ‘‘clay’’ into an apparently final form. In citing Kenyon’s surrender to an ‘‘insight, beyond his consciousness’’ (MF, 271), Hawthorne disjoins this homo-aesthetic process from Kenyon’s embodied subjectivity, creating an ‘‘other’’ agency of intentionality, a closeted subjectivity. If ‘‘nature and art are just at one’’ with Donatello, as Miriam suggests in the novel’s opening scene (MF, 15), then sculpting Donatello’s bust places Kenyon’s hands in the very position Hawthorne wanted to avoid imagining those of Hiram Powers. Not surprisingly, then, when Kenyon recovers his consciousness and recognizes what he has done, he quickly applies his ‘‘artful fingers to the clay, and compelled the bust to dismiss the expression that had so startled them both.’’ ‘‘It were a sin,’’ he exclaims, ‘‘shocked at his own casual production,’’ to ‘‘let the clay, which bears your features, harden into a look like that’’ (MF, 272). Having enjoyed the tactile pleasure of playing

with another man’s sculpted body, Kenyon atones for the ‘‘sin’’ he feels he has committed with his ‘‘loving hands’’ (MF, 273). James walked into Italy from Switzerland in 1869, less than a decade after Hawthorne published The Marble Faun, and when he made it to Rome, he quite naturally visited the Capitoline Museum where Hawthorne had seen the marble faun and had set the opening scene of his novel. In the letter James wrote to his sister Alice, recounting his visit to the Capitoline Museum and to the room that contained the marble faun, he describes seeing only the ‘‘Dying Gladiator, the Lydian Apollo, the Amazon etc—all of them unspeakably simple and noble and eloquent of the breadth of human genius.’’ 25 Although Leon Edel comments that James initially looked at Europe ‘‘with the eyes of his predecessor Hawthorne,’’ James omits any mention of the Praxiteles Faun in this letter, even though that sculpture was in the same room at the Capitoline as the sculptures he does mention.26 Roderick Hudson, in fact, includes no mention of the marble faun, and even though James would comment that Hawthorne’s novel forms ‘‘part of the intellectual equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome, and is read by every Englishspeaking traveller who arrives there, who has been there, or who expects to go,’’ none of the American characters in Roderick Hudson gives any sign of having read the book.27 And despite the highly charged view of sculpture James would take in his letter to Hendrik Andersen and in his criticism of Hawthorne’s squeamishness, James’s novel includes no scene as erotically charged as the scene in which Kenyon shapes his own clay faun. Roderick Hudson does show James struggling with similarly vexing questions, however, and it is fun to imagine James standing in front of the Dying Galatian, trying not to see the marble faun right beside it but seeing it nonetheless.28 James’s repression of the Praxiteles Faun and The Marble Faun that it sponsors, I want to suggest, has much the same status as Hawthorne’s repression of Washington’s nakedness as he describes viewing Powers’s statue. The connection is slippery, I realize, but there is a sense in which paternal nakedness—whether in the case of the father of our country or in the case of the father of American novels—represents the original and originating condition on which each writer is loath to lay his hands. Ironically, in view of his shocked description, Hawthorne deals much more forthrightly than James with the issues that male nakedness raises, as the guidebook quality of his novel reduces the gap between representation and its objects. If James represses Hawthorne’s influence, it pops up like most repressed con-

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tents throughout the novel in which he so deliberately tries to keep it unexpressed and unacknowledged. James surely does not want The Marble Faun to appear ‘‘naked’’ in Roderick Hudson. In fact, by conflating Hawthorne’s effervescent Donatello and the sculptor Kenyon, James opens up the opportunity to represent male-to-male relationships without the aesthetic mediation that Hawthorne employs. James would register his own conflicted attitude toward nudity in sculpture in William Wetmore Story and His Friends—interestingly, through his commentary on Story’s Cleopatra, the same sculpture Hawthorne had attributed to Kenyon in The Marble Faun. James could be writing about Hawthorne, in fact, in condescendingly characterizing Story’s romanticism, his comparatively unsophisticated view of art. James would criticize Story’s ‘‘too liberal use of drapery’’ in his Cleopatra, but in the context of wondering how it reflected tastes of the earlier period—‘‘what the felt demand for drapery, in the mid-Victorian time, may really have been.’’ 29 James’s point is that Story kept on the ‘‘safe side’’ of contemporary values even as he obviously ‘‘loved the nude, as the artist, in any field, essentially and logically must; and he paid it, in marble, in verse, in prose, such frank tribute, on occasion, as he might.’’ 30 James goes on to give Story more credit for representing nudity than he gives Hawthorne, but he misreads the Cleopatra passage in The Marble Faun somewhat disingenuously in the process. Without being explicit, Hawthorne emphasizes the passion that Kenyon’s Cleopatra The Dying Galatian. arouses whereas James suggests that Hawthorne veils the scene and the statue rather prudishly. Miriam, he claims, weaves ‘‘fine fancies about her [Cleopatra] in the gentle Hawthornesque way; as a result of which, and of the talk, of the scene, of the whole charming context and confusion, the beautiful light mantle of the book, all loose and soft and ample, is thrown over the statue.’’ 31 Despite his deliberate efforts to distinguish himself from Hawthorne, James reveals doubts about sculpted nudity in his late letters to Hendrik Andersen. Although he pays ‘‘tribute’’ to Andersen’s ‘‘noble imagination’’ and his ‘‘splendid sense of the body and the members’’ of his

‘‘prodigious’’ nude sculptures, he worries about the American market for Andersen’s ‘‘colossal multiplication of divinely naked and intimately associated gentlemen and ladies, flaunting their bellies and bottoms and their other private affairs.’’ 32 James seems to have internalized Hawthorne’s squeamishness over nudity and projected it onto the American market. What might James have learned from Hawthorne, I want to ask, when he sat down to write his own story of an American sculptor in Rome? What bearing might The Marble Faun have on the questions of gender, art, and relationships that James raises in his own novel? In particular, how might Hawthorne have helped James negotiate the difficult ground of male-to-male relationships that he would mark out in Roderick Hudson? Finally, what might James have thought in 1905, when he revised Roderick Hudson for the New York edition, while pursuing a passionate epistolary affair with sculptor Hendrik Andersen? James’s observation in his preface to the New York edition of Roderick Hudson that his subject had ‘‘defined itself’’ as ‘‘not directly in the least’’ his ‘‘young sculptor’s adventure’’ but indirectly as ‘‘another man’s view and experience of him’’ (RH, xvi–xvii) must have bristled with uncanny personal meaning in light of his own relationship with Andersen.33 James’s comments on The Marble Faun in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, however, suggest relatively little about connections between that novel and his own Roderick Hudson. All the same, of Hawthorne’s four major characters, James devotes the most attention to Donatello, the ‘‘simple, joyous sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming innocent animal.’’ The Marble Faun is Donatello’s story, in James’s view, ‘‘and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime,’’ and I want to explore the implications of James’s startling characterization of Donatello’s ‘‘miserable conscious manhood’’ for his own representation of manhood in Roderick Hudson.34 That question is complicated. James’s one regret, as he describes Hawthorne’s hero, is that Donatello is not more real and more ‘‘definitely modern’’—that is, not as much like the Roman boys with whom he was familiar. ‘‘Among the young Italians of today,’’ he concludes, ‘‘there are still plenty of models for such an image as Hawthorne appears to have wished to present in the easy and natural Donatello.’’ 35 James knew his fauns, and his desire that Hawthorne close the representational gap between Donatello and the ‘‘definitely modern’’ Roman boys he had observed replicates Hawthorne’s own interest in dissolving the difference between the marble faun and Donatello, the Galatea-like vivification of the Praxiteles sculpture. Despite the relative absence of sculpted materiality in Roderick Hudson, James would take his own advice by eliminat-

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ing the ‘‘middle man’’ as much as possible and stressing the relationship between sculptor (Roderick Hudson) and patron/viewer (Rowland Mallet). What the devil would a man do, James seems to ask, with a faunlike sculptor? Roderick Hudson is an artist to ‘‘his fingers’ ends,’’ James observes early in the novel (RH, 29), but Roderick plays object as much as subject in this novel that James considered ‘‘another man’s, his friend’s and patron’s, view and experience of him’’ (RH, xvii). James goes on, perhaps making fun of Hawthorne’s puritanical tastes, to attribute to Roderick’s mother a ‘‘holy horror of a profession which consists exclusively . . . in making figures of people divested of all clothing’’ (RH, 29). Similarities between The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson abound, but my interest here is in their sculptors, sculpted bodies, and the relationships that sculpture mediates. The product of ‘‘stiff Puritan stock,’’ son of a father who was a ‘‘chip of the primal Puritan block,’’ Rowland Mallet obviously resembles Kenyon, whom Hawthorne called a ‘‘Man of Marble’’ (MF, 4). Mallet avoids being ‘‘turned to stone himself’’ (RH, 9) by becoming a kind of sculptor of human flesh. Whether or not James was reminded of Hawthorne’s preference for the hands-on experience of clay, James employs that idea metaphorically in noting that, because Mallet feels bored to have his ‘‘hands always so empty,’’ he ‘‘embraced the idea that something considerable might be made of Roderick’’ (RH, 48). He will have his ‘‘hands rather full’’ with Roderick, his cousin Cecilia warns him. A ‘‘remarkably pretty boy’’ (RH, 17) whose ‘‘admirably chiselled’’ features possess ‘‘extraordinary beauty’’ (RH, 23), Roderick reminds Rowland of ‘‘some beautiful, supple, restless, brighteyed animal, whose motions should have no deeper warrant than the tremulous delicacy of its structure’’ (RH, 31), and he obviously recalls Donatello. And as much as Hawthorne, James interests himself in questions about natural, as opposed to constructed, manhood in Roderick Hudson. Roderick’s first sculpture, a bronze statuette called Thirst that Mallet immediately takes into his hands, represents a Donatello-like ‘‘youth of ancient fable—Hylas or Narcissus, Paris or Endymion’’— whose beauty is the ‘‘beauty of natural movement’’ (RH, 17). Robert Martin, noting the mention of Hylas, beloved of Hercules, argues that the sculpture’s function is to ‘‘make the reader aware of a homosexual (or homoerotic) relationship between the two men,’’ and the four mythological figures James mentions all illustrate the ephebic ideal that Abigail Solomon-Godeau has examined in Male Trouble.36 James certainly knew the body type, and his use of it early in the novel emphasizes Roderick’s position as the object of Rowland Mallet’s, and the reader’s, attention and potential desire. According to James’s account of his ap-

prenticeship, moreover, Roderick has used his sculptural ‘‘fingertips’’ to form male rather than female figures. Surveying Roderick’s early sculptures reveals an interesting range of male figures with obvious roots in the historical moment: a ‘‘colossal head of a negro tossed back, defiant, with distended nostrils’’; a bust of his dead brother (killed in the Civil War); and of course the bust of his boss at the bank, Barnaby Striker, which Roderick climactically smashes with a hammer in order to signal his break with American commercialism and his passionate commitment to his European excursion with Rowland. That gesture, and especially James’s observation that the bust ‘‘cracked into a dozen pieces,’’ which ‘‘topple’’ upon the floor, recalls the Model’s fate in The Marble Faun and also foreshadows the violence latent in the homosocial relationships on which James centers so much of his attention. James would have found in Walter Pater’s account of German art historian Johann Wincklemann’s interest in Greek sculpture authorization for admiring beautiful male bodies and seeking intimate male friendships—a model for the homo-aesthetic friendship of critic and sculptor that he represented in Roderick Hudson and belatedly discovered when he met Hendrik Andersen. That Wincklemann’s ‘‘affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it,’’ Pater avows, ‘‘is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido’s archangel. These friendships, bringing him into contact with the pride of the human form, perfected his reconciliation to the spirit of Greek sculpture.’’ 37 Roderick’s sculptural relation- Jean-Pierre Granger, Ganymede, 1812. ship with Rowland uncannily anticipates James’s relationship with Andersen, the American-born sculptor he met in Rome in May 1899. ‘‘The moment James climbed the stairs into Andersen’s sun-filled Roman studio,’’ observes Fred Kaplan, ‘‘he began a memorable relationship that was to clutch at his heart for the next five years.’’ 38 As if replicating the behavior of his own protagonist, James immediately became Andersen’s patron; he insisted upon purchasing

Andersen’s portrait bust of a young boy, Count Alberto Bevilacqua, which not only looked much like Andersen himself but must have reminded James at least a little of Donatello, the Count of Monte Beni.39 In his letters James pointedly used Andersen’s sculptures to mediate his own desire for the sculptor. Before closing his May 9, 1906, letter with the tender ‘‘goodnight, dearest Hendrik. I draw you close and hold you long and am ever tenderly yours,’’ James offers Andersen extended advice about sculpting nudity:

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I should go down on my knees to you, for instance, to individualize and detail the faces, the types ever so much more—to study, ardently, the question of doing that—the whole face-question. I should cheekily warn you against a tendency to neglect elegance—to emphasize too much the thickness and stoutness of limb, at the risk of making certain legs, especially from the knee down, seem too short etc.—and arms also too ‘‘stocky’’ and stony. The faces too blank and stony—the hair, for me, always too merely symbolic—and not living and felt. These offensive things I should say to you—in such a fashion that you would but love me better and our friendship would be but the tenderer and closer.40

In this remarkable passage James overtly negotiates an ardent verbal relationship with Andersen through his sculptural criticism. Down on his knees before the sculptor, James examines the sculpted bodies and encourages Andersen to forego the symbolic register for the fully and individually embodied. James designs this ‘‘offensive’’ advice, moreover, to have a similar—more ‘‘living and felt’’— effect on his own relationship with Andersen. Roderick Hudson’s relationship with Rowland Mallet progresses more rapidly than James’s with Andersen. Roderick evolves as both subject and object, sculptor and sculpted object, and the personal changes he experiences in Italy, which James archly labels a ‘‘transformation’’ in the 1875 edition of the novel, register on his body, as if it were still in the clay.41 Shortly after his arrival in Rome, for example, he becomes convinced that he has a new body. Uncannily anticipating James’s 1906 letter to Andersen, he wonders to Mallet, ‘‘Surely I haven’t the same face. Haven’t I different eyes, a different skin, different arms and legs?’’ (RH, 86), and he projects this self-sculptured sense of protean possibility—the ‘‘grand genius of me!’’ (RH, 88)—into his early sculptures. He thinks of sculpture the way Whitman thought of poetry—in terms of embodiment and size. ‘‘We stand like a race with shrunken muscles,’’ Roderick claims (vaguely echoing Hawthorne’s observations about the Praxiteles

Faun), ‘‘staring helplessly at the weights our forefathers easily lifted’’; ‘‘I mean to go in for big things; that’s my notion of art’’ (RH, 116). James’s sculptor, in contrast to Hawthorne’s, like James’s taste in relation to his predecessor’s, will go in for things more ‘‘robust.’’ He was ‘‘prompt, spontaneous, sincere,’’ James comments; ‘‘he was too adventuresome a spirit to be successfully tamed’’ (RH, 101). Indeed, Roderick’s first stage of artistic development represents a homo-aesthetic phase of sculpting male bodies. A logical extension of his thirsty male figure, his first Roman sculpture is an Adam inspired by his watching, ensconced in a gondola with Rowland, a ‘‘brown-breasted gondolier make, in high relief against the sky of the Adriatic, muscular movements of a breadth and grace that he had never seen equalled’’ (RH, 91). This triangulated scene in which two men gaze at another man’s seminaked body serves James as a means of mediating a relationship he would find it difficult to name. Jumping up after two hours of observation, in a kind of epiphany of phallogocentric inspiration, Roderick declares that the ‘‘only thing worth living for was to build a colossal bronze and set it aloft in the light of a public square’’ (RH, 92). Determined to ‘‘hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with’’ (RH, 93), Roderick ‘‘wrestled all day with a mountain of clay in his studio.’’ He was ‘‘passionately interested, he was feeling his powers,’’ James writes, and like Kenyon claiming to have ‘‘kindled a great fire’’ within himself in sculpting his Cleopatra, Roderick believes that his powers, ‘‘thoroughly kindled in the glowing aesthetic atmosphere of Rome,’’ will never dissipate. He keeps models in his studio ‘‘till they dropped with fatigue’’ (RH, 102) and finally shapes the ‘‘miraculous,’’ life-sized Adam, a sculpture he was ‘‘never afterwards to surpass’’ (RH, 103). In contrast to Hawthorne’s refusal to imagine a naked George Washington—much less a Washington coming to hot life in a sculptor’s hands—Roderick plunges his hands into the clay. When put into Carrara marble that Rowland has chosen, this product of Roderick’s powerful passions passes ‘‘formally into Rowland’s possession’’ (RH, 104). James had complained of Hawthorne’s Donatello that he was not more real and more ‘‘definitely modern,’’ 42 and in Roderick’s Adamic adaptation of the brown-breasted and muscular gondolier he demonstrates his own determination to exploit the Italian scene of modern-day ‘‘fauns.’’ 43 In his ability to sculpt an ideal male nude Roderick proves more successful than Hendrik Andersen, whom James would criticize for his inability to differentiate his nude figures by gender: ‘‘I sometimes find your sexes (putting the indispensable sign apart!) not quite intensely enough differentiated—I mean through the ladies resembling a shade

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too much the gentlemen.’’ Divesting the penis of its phallocentric signifying power, James expands the coverage of his critical gaze to encompass other body parts. Citing the figure of a ballerina, James criticizes Andersen’s failure to allow her ‘‘sufficient luxury’’ of hip, ‘‘or to speak plainly, Bottom’’; ‘‘she hasn’t much more of that than her husband and I should like her to have a good deal more.’’ 44 Focusing though he does on a female figure and her ‘‘Bottom,’’ James closes his letter by expressing his desire to ‘‘take’’ Andersen to his ‘‘heart’’ and to ‘‘feel’’ his arms around him—making it clear that here, too, he uses sculptural criticism to express his desire for Andersen himself. James had established a similarly mediated relationship between Roderick Hudson and Rowland Mallet, but that relationship founders when Roderick turns from sculpting male to sculpting female figures. Roderick’s deterioration as a sculptor mirrors the transformation Donatello undergoes in The Marble Faun, and it occurs for similar reasons. During his holiday at Baden-Baden, Roderick falls in with ‘‘people who really knew how to be low’’; he spends his time ‘‘dangling about several pretty women and reflecting that it was always something gained for a sculptor to sit under a tree looking at his leisure into a charming face and saying things that made it smile and play its muscles and part its lips and show its teeth’’ (RH, 138). We learn later that he has met Christina Light in Baden-Baden, and when he joins Rowland in Geneva, he confesses that his nature and will—and his sexual orientation—have been shaped for good. Although he acknowledges that there are ‘‘all kinds of uncanny underhand currents moving to and fro between one’s will and the rest of one— one’s imagination in particular,’’ he has concluded that a ‘‘certain group of circumstances’’ have conspired to ‘‘snap’’ his ‘‘power to choose’’ like a ‘‘dry twig’’ (RH, 141). Roderick’s logic is a little difficult to follow—part of James’s gentle parody of boyish enthusiasm—but the transformation he describes, a fall into heterosexuality, resembles Donatello’s in The Marble Faun. His earlier exuberance, sponsored by ‘‘underhand currents’’ that liberate his powers of object choice, has given way to a circumstantially constructed imaginary that naturalizes desire by heterosexualizing object choice. As Roderick announces resignedly to Rowland, ‘‘One conviction I’ve gathered from my summer’s experience . . . is that I’m damnably susceptible, by nature, to the grace and the beauty and the mystery of women, to their power to turn themselves ‘on’ as creatures of subtlety and perversity. . . . So there you have me’’ (RH, 141– 42). Like Miriam in The Marble Faun, whose gaze creates Donatello as a heterosexual male—what James would call ‘‘miserable conscious manhood’’—Christina Light establishes a similar model for Roderick’s

manly development.45 She naturalizes and normalizes his desire. Her beauty is so extraordinary, James observes, it is as if ‘‘nature had produced it for man’s delight and meant that it should surrender itself freely and coldly to admiration’’ (RH, 151). Inspired by his vision, Roderick begins to model a new, female figure, a ‘‘woman leaning lazily back in her chair’’ whose image effectively triangulates and thereby forecloses upon the expression of male-to-male desire that James had earlier represented. Although Rowland gladly took possession of Roderick’s ‘‘Adam,’’ he is not sure he likes this replica of the Capitoline Agrippina because it ‘‘differed singularly from anything his friend had yet done’’ (RH, 143). Roderick, James implies, can’t do women, and as he falters in his studio, he puts his manhood at risk. ‘‘Be a man,’’ Rowland tells him, with some annoyance at his whining, ‘‘and don’t, for heaven’s sake, talk in that confoundedly querulous voice’’ (RH, 149). Roderick himself recognizes that six months before he could stand up to his work ‘‘like a man’’ (RH, 147). In the famous scene in the Colosseum in chapter 13, Christina cries out for a man ‘‘cast in a bigger mould than most of the vulgar human breed,’’ but this demand that Roderick reincarnate himself as one of his own ‘‘big things’’ comes with a catch. She only wants a man who can give her a ‘‘feeling’’ that will cause her to ‘‘send Prince Casamassima and his millions to perdition’’ (RH, 261). Articulating a heterosexual demand, Christina’s voice effectively constructs Roderick’s desire and the male subjectivity behind it. This rather trite example of a belle dame sans merci, sapping male strength and creativity, can be read otherwise if we note Roderick’s relatively undifferentiated desire during the early part of the novel. Even though Christina later complains that the ‘‘world’s idea of possible relations, either for man or woman, is so poor—there would be so many nice free ones’’ (RH, 409)—James uses her agency and the influence of Roderick’s conscience to reconstruct Roderick’s imagination along heterosexual and heterotextual lines. Roderick may be observed ‘‘ardently shaping a formless mass of clay’’ into a replica of Christina (RH, 170), but Christina also shapes Roderick into a particular kind of man. Recalling the Tarpeian Rock scene in The Marble Faun, although triangulated somewhat less catastrophically, this scene also enforces a compulsive heterosexuality. Rising to the challenge Christina offers—but not finally indulging in the foolhardy enterprise of plucking a flower from a fragment of wall some twenty feet above them—Roderick asserts his manhood in just the terms Christina has outlined. She demanded a man with the ‘‘voice of a conqueror’’ (RH, 261); Roderick thunders, ‘‘Sit down!’’ when she tries to prevent what even the horrified Rowland Mallet considers a ‘‘gallant’’ gesture (RH, 265).

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James replicates this scene of at least a potential ‘‘fall’’ in Rowland’s later vision of Roderick plunging to his death into a gulf of annihilation (RH, 314). As it evolves, Rowland’s fantasy triangulates desire in much the same way Hawthorne did; he imagines Mary Garland ‘‘standing there with eyes in which the horror seemed slowly, slowly to expire’’ and being left to him (RH, 315). James explores the complexities of this triangulated or quadrangulated relationship for much of the rest of the novel, and he does so in terms that echo those in The Marble Faun. As he imagines Mary’s subject position and desire for Roderick, he considers her ‘‘abject for some last scrap’’ of the ‘‘feast’’ of her dream of marriage. He resists this vision, however, because it causes a gender inversion, rendering Mary a ‘‘mere male in petticoats’’ (RH, 449). Later, Rowland himself feels ‘‘abject’’ before Mary, as he imagines her ‘‘throwing herself back into Roderick’s arms at his slightest overture’’ (RH, 474). In view of his earlier fantasy and especially his very similar readiness to jump at Roderick’s beck and call, Rowland appears doubly abject before Roderick. He occupies a ‘‘girl’s’’ position, particularly when he broaches the subject of his intentions to Roderick. ‘‘Roderick had made him promises,’’ James notes, ‘‘and it was to be expected that he should wish to ascertain how the promises had been kept’’ (RH, 475). Although Roderick characterizes his relationship with Christina Light as a ‘‘blest idea shaping itself in the block’’—but now ‘‘suddenly split and turned rotten’’ (RH, 481)—Roderick himself furnishes the best idea of rot and waste. When he dies at the end of the novel—like Miriam’s Model, by falling to his death on the rocks in the Alps—he appears, like Miriam’s Model, as a ruined sculpture, a ‘‘vague white mass’’ that ‘‘lay tumbled upon the stones.’’ 46 Although James quickly notes that he is ‘‘singularly little disfigured’’ (RH, 523), Rowland resists this example of what Hawthorne called the ‘‘intimate production’’ of male embodiment. He cannot at first bring himself to touch Roderick’s body. ‘‘An attempt to move him would attest some fatal fracture, some horrible physical dishonour,’’ so Rowland’s one gesture is to close Roderick’s eyes. The result—vaguely similar to Kenyon’s sculpting of Donatello— is a modest, Galatea-like animation: ‘‘The eyes were the eyes of death, but in a short time, when he had closed them, the whole face seemed to revive. The rain had washed away all blood; it was as if violence, having wrought her ravage, had stolen away in shame. Roderick’s face might have shamed her; it was indescribably, and all so innocently fair’’ (RH, 524). Robert Martin considers Rowland responsible for Roderick’s death

insofar as he fails to love Roderick by accepting the ‘‘full human implications, including the sexual, of the master-prote´ge´ relationship’’— fails, in other words, to offer Roderick the sort of healing touch that James later imagines giving to and receiving from Hendrik Andersen.47 In shutting Roderick’s eyes, Rowland symbolically breaks the circuit of male gazing; he transforms himself in this gesture into a voyeur, something like Whitman’s twenty-ninth bather in being invisible to the other man whose body is fully displayed to his eyes and hands. The sort of tentative looks between men in which desire is read and erotic subjectivity inferred are not possible in this scene. Roderick may be exposed, but he remains unconscious of his exposure.48 James’s purification of Roderick’s body resembles the ‘‘fossilizing process’’ that Hawthorne attributed to Kenyon in The Marble Faun. ‘‘You turn feverish men into cool, quiet marble,’’ Miriam had observed to him (MF, 119). Fully displayed on his back to Rowland’s male gaze, Roderick’s posture recalls a sculpture Hawthorne mentioned in his preface, Benjamin Paul Akers’s well-known Dead Pearl Diver (see page 87), and James even notes that his ‘‘clothes and hair were wet as if the billows of the ocean had flung him upon the strand’’ (RH, 524). William Gerdts notes Victorian America’s ‘‘fascination’’ with the nude, especially when nudity could be linked with death and ‘‘watery themes,’’ and he describes Akers’s ‘‘pathetic sculpture’’ as a ‘‘handsome young man struck down in his youth.’’ 49 James’s otherwise gratuitous remark that Roderick’s body appears wet suggests his own interest in this convention. Roderick’s death renders him statuelike, and Rowland’s gaze and any desire it may express remain narcissistically contained. After Kenyon had serendipitously re-created Donatello’s face at the moment he killed the Model, he abruptly dismisses that expression by manipulating the clay. Left alone with Roderick, Rowland Mallet experiences similar feelings of guilt. He loses himself in ‘‘dark places of passion’’ within himself, and he ‘‘lashes’’ himself with a ‘‘scourge of steel’’ for his conduct toward Roderick (RH, 525).50 The trace of blood, the one sign of the ‘‘internal economy’’—the ‘‘flesh and pulp,’’ the ‘‘blood-flow under the surface’’—that James would later admonish Hendrik Andersen to emphasize in his art, recalls the trace of blood that trickles from the Model’s mouth in The Marble Faun. In Hawthorne’s novel, according to the legend Kenyon recounts, the spontaneous blood flow occurs in the presence of the murderer. In Roderick Hudson that blood must be removed before Roderick can in a sense come back to life. In this undertaking the body must be purified— the eyes closed, traces of the insides removed. James was a long way

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from the passionate outburst of his letter to Andersen in representing the ‘‘flesh and pulp,’’ the ‘‘blood-flow under the surface,’’ the tingling and flushing flesh, on the surface of his character— even though Rowland Mallet spends seven long hours with the body, a gap in the narrative that James refuses to fill even as he calls attention to this extended moment between men: ‘‘The most rational of men was for an hour the most passionate. He reviled himself with transcendent bitterness, he accused himself of cruelty and injustice, he would have lain down there in Roderick’s place to unsay the words that had yesterday driven him forth on his lonely ramble’’ (RH, 387). Only indirectly, through a fantasy of substitution and guilty self-abuse, does James express the erotic charge that this moment carries—a dream come true as nightmare in which male desire has free rein to play with the abject, dead body of another man. The outcomes of The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson describe a similar logic in male-male relationships and male embodiment—the relationship of men to other men’s bodies. Both novels represent sculptors who fail to sustain their creative passions when they ‘‘fall,’’ arguably into heterosexuality. Both represent ‘‘natural’’ manhood and indiscriminate eroticism being inscribed or constructed by conventional, heterosexual and homosocial, values. This process of socialization, the normalization of erotic energy, registers not only on the male characters, but on the act of sculpture; and insofar as sculpture and especially the act of men sculpting men offer a playground for unrestricted tactile pleasures, both novels reflect an ultimate police action at the site of such homoerotic pleasure. While Roderick Hudson goes bust as a sculptor, never equaling his first Italian statue of Adam, Kenyon never finishes his bust of Donatello. He attempts a second bust in his Roman studio, based on what Hawthorne calls his ‘‘reminiscence’’ of Donatello’s face, but the result is a ‘‘fossil countenance’’ (MF, 273), which Hilda approves for its suggestion of Donatello’s evolution into a ‘‘higher state’’ (MF, 274). Ironically, however, this ‘‘striking effect’’ coincides with the bust’s remaining forever in such an ‘‘unfinished state’’— expressing the ‘‘riddle of the soul’s growth, taking its first impulse amid remorse and pain, and struggling through the incrustations of the senses’’ (MF, 274).51 Hawthorne himself claims that it ‘‘was the contemplation of this imperfect portrait of Donatello that originally interested us in his history’’ (MF, 275)—thereby acknowledging the impulse to explore the possibilities of natural, or ‘‘unfinished,’’ manhood that he would repress in his viewing of Powers’s George Washington. Hawthorne and his sculptor do not quite finish Donatello’s construction as a man; they leave him in state of suspended animation—unable quite to come out of the clay,

perhaps still awaiting the touch of a Pygmalion who might make him, to recall Miriam’s words, grow ‘‘more and more towards hot life’’ beneath his hands.

notes 1. Henry James, Roderick Hudson, vol. 1 of the New York edition (New York: Scribner’s, 1907), 346. Subsequent references to the New York edition of Roderick Hudson will appear parenthetically in the text as RH. 2. The French and Italian Notebooks, vol. 14 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 281. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text as FIN. 3. ‘‘Review of Passages from the French and Italian Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne,’’ in Henry James: Literary Criticism. Volume 1: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 311. 4. Henry James, Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1879), 161. 5. Henry James Letters, vol. 4, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 394. 6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘‘Inside Henry James: Toward a Lexicon for The Art of the Novel,’’ in Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, ed. Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke (New York: Routledge, 1995), 131. 7. As Leon Edel and more recently Daniel Murtaugh have noted, James’s letters to Andersen are characterized by a lot of ‘‘physical, tactile language’’ (The Treacherous Years: 1895–1901, vol. 4 of The Life of Henry James [New York: Lippincott, 1969], 312). James imagines the touch of hands as healing both parties. He imagines himself laying upon Andersen a ‘‘pair of hands soothing, sustaining, positively healing, in the quality of their pressure’’ (quoted in The Treacherous Years 4 : 314). In another letter, however, James acknowledges, ‘‘Every word of you is as soothing as a caress of your hand, and the sense of the whole as sweet to me as being able to lay my own on you’’ (Henry James Letters, 4 : 310). Edel envisions Andersen ‘‘opening James up to sensory feeling to a greater degree than had been the case earlier; perhaps the touch of those strong fingers of the sculptor’s hand may have given James a sense of physical closeness and warmth which he had never allowed himself to feel in earlier years’’ (Henry James Letters, 4 : 315). By examining James’s revisions to Roderick Hudson for the New York edition, Murtaugh has traced his ‘‘developing sexual awareness’’ from the ‘‘non-tactile, idealized concept of male companionship’’ during the initial composition period (1874–1875) to ‘‘that of physical intimacy and possessive sexual yearning evident during the revision period (1905–1906)’’ (‘‘An Emotional Reflection: Sexual Realization in Henry James’s Revisions to Roderick Hudson,’’ Henry James Review 17 [1996]: 183). James’s revisions, Murtaugh

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demonstrates, ‘‘closely parallel in diction and intensity the erotically-charged and emotionally-engaged language of his letters to the young men with whom he had fallen in love during the years shortly preceding the revision process’’ (184). 8. Ellmann argues in fact that James’s ‘‘inflamed’’ reading of Pater’s Renaissance ‘‘played a large part in the composition of Roderick Hudson’’ (‘‘Henry James among the Aesthetes,’’ Proceedings of the British Academy 69 [1983]: 209, 210). Savoy attributes James’s reticence about Pater to homosexual panic, and he illustrates James’s ‘‘contradictory responses of identification and detachment’’ (‘‘Hypocrite Lecteur: Walter Pater, Henry James and Homotextual Politics,’’ Dalhousie Review 72 [Spring 1992]: 28). 9. Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). 10. The Marble Faun: or, The Romance of Monte Beni, vol. 4 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 115. Subsequent references to this edition of The Marble Faun will appear parenthetically in the text as MF. 11. In his preface to The Marble Faun Hawthorne admitted basing Kenyon’s Cleopatra on William Wetmore Story’s ‘‘magnificent statue’’ (MF, 4). 12. Commissioned by the Louisiana legislature and designed for the state capitol in Baton Rouge, Powers’s Washington has not survived. Actually, Powers did not model the statue of Washington in clay. He had been experimenting with plaster modeling as a way of saving valuable time. His statue California was the first piece he modeled entirely in plaster and Washington was the second. Nevertheless, modeling in moist plaster still required the work of the sculptor’s hands, as well as small trowels (Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873, vol. 1 [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991], 278). 13. The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe, vol. 3 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964), 41. 14. Jonathan Auerbach, ‘‘Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture, and Romance-Writing in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun,’’ ELH 47 (1980): 106, 107. 15. Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Father: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 236; Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), 229. 16. Hawthorne echoes Hiram Powers in his view of Gibson’s flesh-colored statues. Color, Powers had written, ‘‘adjoins a material body to form. This material body is not seen in a pure piece of marble, but the Spiritual body is seen in it. The Soul is in it but not the flesh. The painter adds the flesh but not the sentiment. To what is Spiritual he adds what is material, and to the voluptuary this would be agreeable but not to the chaste mind, who would wish to see a Venus perfectly nude and colored imperfectly, but sufficiently colored to attract the sensual’’ (quoted in Wunder, Hiram Powers, 1: 278). Powers went

on to hope that Gibson would cease coloring his works; if not, then ‘‘good bye to genuine sculpture. We shall see a bastard art spring up, neither painting nor sculpture but mongrel’’ (Wunder, 1: 279). 17. William H. Gerdts, ‘‘Marble and Nudity,’’ Art in America 59 (May– June 1971): 62. 18. Walter Pater, ‘‘The Age of Aesthetic Prizemen,’’ Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1910), 282–83. 19. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 25–26. 20. Gary Schmidgall, The Stranger Wilde: Interpreting Oscar (New York: Dutton, 1994), 180, 161. 21. Dolly Sherwood notes the resemblance of The Sleeping Faun to the Barberini Faun and the Praxiteles Faun in Harriet Hosmer: American Sculptor, 1830 – 1908 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 239– 40. My point in referring to these two sculptures is simply to establish a context of gender and sexuality for understanding Hawthorne’s deliberate choice of a model in The Marble Faun. At least at the beginning of the novel, Donatello represents a neutral and neutered territory of masculinity. 22. Nancy Bentley, ‘‘Slaves and Fauns: Hawthorne and the Uses of Primitivism,’’ ELH 57 (1990): 901–37. 23. Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 87. We can only speculate about whether Hawthorne’s experience in sitting for his own portrait bust in Louisa Lander’s Roman studio served him as a model for this remarkable scene. Hawthorne apparently did not see his own bust until Lander finished the clay model (FIN, 78), but as Rita Gollin points out, Hawthorne exuberantly praised the result and even took it home. Furthermore, he reciprocated by composing a ‘‘moral portrait’’ of Lander in his notebook and then drawing upon that entry in delineating Hilda’s character. He and his family liked the final marble version much less, with Julian considering it a ‘‘combination of Daniel Webster and George Washington’’ (Portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Iconography [Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983], 49, 50). 24. Millicent Bell, Hawthorne’s View of the Artist (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1962), 168. 25. Henry James Letters, 1: 167. 26. Henry James Letters, 1: 88. Robert Emmet Long notes that James met a number of people, such as William Wetmore Story and Harriet Hosmer, whom Hawthorne had known during his stay in Rome. ‘‘There must have been times,’’ he concludes, ‘‘when James felt as if he were retracing Hawthorne’s footsteps’’ (The Great Succession: Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979], 38). 27. James, Hawthorne, 165. Roderick does claim that he wants to ‘‘bring back’’ the ‘‘thing’’—the ‘‘sacred terror’’—that Phidias and Praxiteles embody in their sculptures, but the examples he gives are a ‘‘Hera that will make

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you turn blue’’ and an Aphrodite that will ‘‘make you turn—well, faint’’ (RH, 117). What a faun might make ‘‘you’’ do, he doesn’t say. 28. James avoided mentioning the Praxiteles Faun in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), even though he staged a key scene in that novel in the presence of that statue. Isabel Archer rejects Lord Warburton’s proposal in the gallery of the Capitoline Museum that includes the Dying Galatian and the Faun, but in the 1881 edition Isabel surveys the ‘‘circle of sculpture’’ without identifying individual statues (The Portrait of a Lady [New York: Library of America, 1992], 310). Not until the New York edition does James have Isabel notice ‘‘the Antinous and the Faun’’ (The Portrait of a Lady, vol. 3 [New York: Scribner’s, 1908], 258). 29. James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1969), 80, 81. 30. Ibid., 82. 31. Ibid., 86. 32. Henry James Letters, 4 : 405. 33. Robert K. Martin was the first to examine Roderick Hudson for its homoerotic content—as the story ‘‘of a man who fell in love with a handsome young artist, adopted him as his prote´ge´ and took him to Italy, where he watched as the young artist’s life (and art) disintegrated’’ (‘‘The ‘High Felicity’ of Comradeship: A New Reading of Roderick Hudson,’’ American Literary Realism 11 [1978], 101). Fred Kaplan has argued that James understood and manifested his homoeroticism indirectly ‘‘in his idealizations of the beauty of the male body and of male friendship’’ (Henry James: The Imagination of Genius [New York: William Morrow, 1992], 300). 34. James, Hawthorne, 153. 35. Ibid., 155. 36. Martin, ‘‘The ‘High Felicity’ of Comradeship,’’ 103. 37. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1910), 191. 38. Kaplan, Henry James, 447. 39. Citing James’s admission to Andersen that he had ‘‘struck up a tremendous intimacy with dear little Conte Alberto,’’ who is the ‘‘first object that greets my eyes in the morning, and the last at night’’ (Henry James Letters, 4 : 113), Kaplan asserts that ‘‘Andersen’s work stood in for Andersen himself, the part for the whole, a combination of phallic synecdoche and marital displacement’’ (Henry James, 448). 40. Henry James Letters, 4 : 406. 41. Henry James, Roderick Hudson (New York: Penguin, 1986), 104. 42. James, Hawthorne, 169. 43. Ibid., 170. 44. Henry James Letters, 4 : 413. 45. James, Hawthorne, 167. 46. Although she focuses on James’s World War I era writings, Susan M. Griffin examines how James uses wounds and scars to ‘‘represent, and some-

times substitute for, masculine interiority’’ (‘‘Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of Jamesian Masculinity,’’ Arizona Quarterly 53.4 [Winter 1997]: 62). 47. Martin, ‘‘The ‘High Felicity’ of Comradeship,’’ 102. 48. See Susan Bordo, ‘‘Reading the Male Body,’’ in The Male Body: Features, Destinies, Exposures, ed. Laurence Goldstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 283–87, for a relevant discussion of the ‘‘homosexual gaze’’ and its power to strip ‘‘orthodox heterosexuality’’ of its ‘‘armor.’’ 49. Gerdts, ‘‘Marble and Nudity,’’ 65. ‘‘If overt homosexuality is not generally narratable as itself in the nineteenth century, in what forms might such desires be narrated?’’ Scott Derrick asks. One such form, he suggests, is the ‘‘plot of disaster and death, which authorizes a violent and genocidal penetration of the male body, and which also produces emergencies that authorize the expression of tenderness and the giving of care’’ (Monumental Anxieties: Homoerotic Desire and Feminine Influence in 19th-Century U.S. Literature [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997], 90). 50. Christopher Lane has also briefly examined the role of homoerotic desire in Roderick Hudson and its effect upon the ending. Comparing that novel with the later Tragic Muse (1890), he explores the ‘‘complex erotic configuration’’ that governs character relations, while arguing that those relations and the desire that sponsors especially the same-sex relations exceed James’s narrative ability to contain them. Although Lane mistakenly observes that Rowland marries Mary, he still makes the good point that the ‘‘heterosexual imperative’’ governing their relationship ‘‘marks and even scars the end of this novel,’’ because it ‘‘seems to obscure Rowland’s rivalry with Mary for Roderick’’ and because Rowland’s ‘‘conventional (that is, ‘homosocial’) rivalry with Roderick for Mary only partly subsumes his ‘homosexual’ interest in the younger man’’ (‘‘The Impossibility of Seduction in James’s Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse,’’ American Literature 68 [1996]: 747). 51. Charles Swann argues that by ‘‘abandoning the sculpture Kenyon has managed to produce an art-work which embodies a narrative of the soul’s development, which is dynamic and open-ended,’’ but he ignores other reasons, which I believe I have developed here, that Kenyon and Hawthorne might not wish to put their hands back on Donatello’s bust (Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 197).

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roman springs and roman fevers james, gender, and transnational dis-ease

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Henry James often spoke and wrote of his love for Italy, chronicling his travels through that country in Italian Hours, among other works, and adapting it as the setting for a number of his novels. While later works such as The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove use Venice as their backdrop, Rome affords the locale for several early works, such as Roderick Hudson, Daisy Miller, and The Portrait of a Lady. The Eternal City offers James’s fictional characters the promise of enrichment and refinement, but it also often precipitates disease, disaster, and death. Rome is thus a contradictory site for James, a site that invites more analysis than it has yet received. Along a similar critical trajectory, the discrepancies between James’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s responses to Italy call for further investigation. As is well-known, James was quick to point out Hawthorne’s ‘‘Puritan consciousness’’ toward Italy at the same time that he damned The Marble Faun with faint praise: The book has been consecrated as a kind of manual of Roman sights and impressions, brought together indeed in the light of a sympathy always detached and often withheld; and its value is not diminished by its constant reference to an order of things of which, at present, the yearning pilgrim—before a board for the most part swept bare— can only pick up the crumbs. . . . Nothing is more striking than the awkward grace with which the author utters, without consenting to it,—for he is full of half-amiable, half-angry protest and prejudice,—the message, the mystery of the medium in which his actors move.1

James, ever the cosmopolitan, pictures his own response to Italy quite differently. In a letter written to his brother William recounting his first visit to Rome, James portrays himself as an aficionado: ‘‘I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets in a fever of enjoyment. . . . At last— for the first time—I live!’’ 2 The apparent disparity between Hawthorne’s reaction to Italy and James’s own, however, is not as tangible or concrete in James’s Italian novels. Indeed, although James might himself have experienced a surge of life in the Italian capital, his characters do not. Roderick Hudson comes to Rome to practice his art but meets with dissipation. Daisy Miller journeys to Rome during her grand tour yet contracts ‘‘Roman fever’’ there and dies. Isabel Archer makes Rome her home but in the Palazzo Roccanera realizes the farce of her marriage and the extent to which her Euro-American ‘‘friends’’ have used her. Consequently, throughout these works, Rome is constructed as a city both of promise and of the death of that promise, a death that is inscribed on each text’s gendered, and at times eroticized, bodies. Before turning to James’s accounts of death and disease, or societal dis-ease over death, it is important to note how frequently illness is associated with racialized characterizations and constructions. Italy, which embeds contradictory and fragmented cultural significations, provides a rich discursive locus for the interrogation of anxieties surrounding relationships between contagion and the racial or ethnic Other. That is, classical Rome set an aesthetic standard of form and beauty in Western culture matched (or perhaps surpassed?) only by ancient Greece; as a result, ‘‘[c]olonial ambitions and the assertion of Romanness [as one of the ‘cradles of civilisation’] laid a claim for Italy to be included at the heart of whiteness.’’ 3 More contemporary Italians, however, inhabit an ambivalent inside/outside position with regard to ‘‘whiteness.’’ The racial codes of ‘‘white’’ are analyzed in such studies as Richard Dyer’s White, wherein the author suggests that rather than a hegemonic whole, white, as a racial category, effects remarkably divergent meanings: The instability of white as skin colour is not only a means for policing who at any given historical moment is going to be included in or out of the category, but also to differentiate within it, even among those whose racial identity is not in question. In representation, white men are darker than white women. . . . Working class and peasant whites are darker than middle-class and aristocratic whites.4

As a consequence of this situation, Dyer is forced to admit that

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given the variety of whiteness, I have sometimes thought that what I am really writing about is the whiteness of the English, Anglo-Saxons, or North Europeans (and their descendants), that this whiteness would be unrecognisable to Southern or Eastern Europeans (and their descendants). For much of the past two centuries, North European whiteness has been hegemonic within a whiteness that has none the less been assumed to include Southern and Eastern European peoples (albeit sometimes grudgingly . . . ).5

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The inclusion of Italians into dominant significations of whiteness has been strategic, therefore, since classical imperialism made claims of ‘‘a sense of superiority (‘at least I am not a colonial black’) to those at the bottom of the white heap,’’ although ‘‘[l]ower-class and Latin whites . . . may also have the darkness,’’ depending on the period and the script in which they appear.6 Some of Italy’s contradictory associations are apparent in Italian Hours, where James points both to a triumphant Roman antiquity, found in the ‘‘echoes of massive Latinity with which the atmosphere is charged [which] suggest[s] nothing more majestic and monumental,’’ as well as to the uncertain whiteness of contemporary Romans, whom he categorizes as ‘‘dusky human hives.’’ 7 He depicts older women as ‘‘dusky crone[s]’’ (IH, 449), comments on younger women’s ‘‘dusky tresses’’ (IH, 460), and describes a ‘‘naked dusky girl in a wood’’ (IH, 479). When he journeys to Rome after a visit to Paris, the author initially finds the Italian city to be ‘‘meagre,’’ ‘‘provincial,’’ and, of course, ‘‘dusky’’ (IH, 470); moreover, highlighting the presence of Africa always hovering in the background of Italian constructions, he refers to Italy as the ‘‘Niobe of Nations’’ (IH, 465). The instability of Italy as a ‘‘white’’ country is significant, because darkness is often equated with disease. As Athena Vrettos notes: The persistent attempts by Victorian writers and physicians to define the terms of human physicality, to locate in the body the source of sexual and social divisions, to create a physiological blueprint that would explain the meaning of racial difference and restore a sense of social and material order provided a means of controlling potentially disturbing cultural issues by relocating them in questions of physiology.8

Vrettos’s book, Somatic Fictions, explicates the ‘‘entanglement between bodies and narratives—both in the sickroom and the literary text,’’ just as Julia Epstein’s Altered Conditions sets out to interrogate ‘‘the placement of an individual within a socially constructed realm of disease and ill-

ness.’’ 9 As Epstein explains, ‘‘malaise and discomfort with respect to sociocultural categories of the normal’’ illuminate ‘‘the processes and explanations through which some conditions but not others are classified as falling outside societal expectations.’’ 10 Both of these texts, then, along with Peter Logan’s Nerves and Narratives, draw attention to the interrelationship of disease and race, or in Dyer’s words, exemplify how ‘‘[n]on-white people are associated in various ways with the dirt that comes out of the body, notably in the repeated racist perception that they smell. . . . Obsessive control of faeces and identification of them as the nadir of human dirt both characterise Western culture: to be white is to be well potty-trained.’’ 11 To bring these ideas ‘‘home’’ to James, there are innumerable references throughout Italian Hours to the dirt and disease of a darkened Italy, wherein Roman inner courts are ‘‘befouled with rubbish and drearily bare of convenience’’ (IH, 442) but replete with ‘‘the dirt, the dreariness, [and] the misery’’ (IH, 450). This ‘‘darkness and dirt and decay’’ (IH, 465) is ‘‘filled with a stale smell which (like that of the onion) brought tears to my eyes’’ (IH, 472), for Rome’s beauties are ‘‘almost like pearls in a dunghill’’ (IH, 475), which are ‘‘mouldering in its dusky solitude’’ (IH, 472). Disease, of course, abounds here, for the ‘‘Roman air . . . is not a tonic medicine, and it seldom suffers exercise to be all exhilarating’’ (IH, 443); accordingly, the Roman streets are filled with ‘‘horrible beggars . . . thrusting their sores and stumps at you from under every tree’’ (IH, 459). Descriptions of disease, dissipation, and death, such as those found in Italian Hours, assume the form of narrative strategies that, while they concentrate on the body and represent its corporeal ills, also highlight sites of conflict over the permeability of such notions as body and mind, subjectivity and objectivity, social and private, imperial and colonial, masculine and feminine, and so on. In particular, the struggle for the maintenance of social and individual status is woven throughout the fabric of many nineteenth-century novels (and not just those of Henry James) by means of the narrativization of dis-ease. These struggles range from illness as a locus of the tensions between physicality and emotionality, to their resulting effect on the social status of the individual character. In turn, colonization is played out in the relations between affluent tourists and the impoverished countries they visit, as well as corporeally in the form of bodily fluids, germs, and contamination, a key metaphor with its concomitant risks of the contagion of the body politic both at home and abroad. Daisy Miller illustrates these points, which are also evident in Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Golden Bowl. In James’s novella,

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which brought him fame and fortune and popularized the idea of the ‘‘American girl,’’ the title character performs as the nadir of promise, dis-ease, and death. When she is introduced, Daisy’s skin color or hue assumes part of her appeal for her Euro-American admirer: ‘‘Winterbourne had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman’s various features—her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth.’’ 12 Although she is unquestionably ‘‘white,’’ the purity associated with that color is in question, for Daisy’s ignorance of social codes renders her suspect. Mrs. Costello, Winterbourne’s aunt, believes that she is ‘‘very common’’ (DM, 25), but Winterbourne defends her by invoking her whiteness: ‘‘But, my dear aunt, she is not, after all, a Comanche savage’’ (DM, 25). Indeed, Daisy is not, but her whiteness is sullied by her familiarity with the Miller’s Italian courier. To Mrs. Costello’s horror: ‘‘They treat the courier like a familiar friend—like a gentleman. I shouldn’t wonder if he dines with them. Very likely they have never seen a man with such good manners, such fine clothes, so like a gentleman. He probably corresponds to the young lady’s idea of a Count’’ (DM, 26). Winterbourne gathers that Daisy, ‘‘[e]vidently . . . was rather wild’’ (DM, 26), and her wildness is signified through her blushing, or rather, her lack thereof. As Mary Ann O’Farrell has argued in Telling Complexions, blushing is an indicator both of whiteness and of sensibility.13 It is therefore significant that Daisy does not blush ‘‘as a young girl at Geneva would have done’’ (DM, 21) and that ‘‘she blushed neither when she looked at him nor when she saw that people were looking at her’’ (DM, 40), both instances suggesting her outsider status. Daisy’s ability to blush locates her firmly within the telling codes of whiteness, but her failure to do so highlights her social and cultural instability. Indeed, in Rome, she ‘‘goes about alone with foreigners’’ (DM, 45), one of whom, Mr. Giovanelli, she chooses to introduce to Euro-American society at a party thrown by Mrs. Walker, a prominent denizen of those social circles. Not content with breaking the social codes, Daisy walks about with Mr. Giovanelli on the Pincio, despite entreaties that she will get the ‘‘fever’’ (DM, 52). Winterbourne, urged by Mrs. Walker, tries to ‘‘save’’ her from herself and from the ‘‘lowlived foreigner,’’ whom he classifies as a ‘‘music-master, or a penny-aliner, or a third-rate artist’’ (DM, 57). Daisy’s conduct, flirting ‘‘with any man she could pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians’’ (DM, 62), renders her publically ‘‘untouchable’’ and engenders her fall from social grace. This fall is linked to Giovanelli’s color, which is emphasized, as is often the case in nineteenth-century characterizations of blackness, by highlighting his

startlingly white teeth (and drawing attention to the contrast between dental whiteness and skin color). Winterbourne notes that Giovanelli ‘‘smiled and bowed and showed his white teeth, [then] curled his moustaches and rolled his eyes, and performed all the proper functions of a handsome Italian at an evening party’’ (DM, 67). The difference in Rome’s significations—that of the vaunted past and the dismal present—is heralded by Daisy’s visits with ‘‘the polished little Roman’’ (DM, 71) and Mrs. Costello’s observation that she ‘‘goes on from day to day, from hour to hour, as they did in the Golden Age. I can imagine nothing more vulgar’’; concomitantly, she pretends to understand Giovanelli’s appeal, as he ‘‘is very handsome. One easily sees how it is. She thinks him the most elegant man in the world, the finest gentleman. She has never seen anything like him; he is better even than the courier’’ (DM, 73). Giovanelli is always referred to as ‘‘the little Italian’’ or the ‘‘little Roman’’ (DM, 73), and although he is suitably ‘‘obsequious,’’ as befitting his inferior rank (and color), Daisy’s reputation is sullied by her relations with his darkness. Indeed, when one evening Winterbourne approaches the ‘‘dusky’’ Colosseum, he reminds himself that ‘‘if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum are recommended by the poets, they are deprecated by the doctors. The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma’’ (DM, 81). Finding Daisy also in attendance, he decides to intervene ‘‘from a sanitary point of view,’’ for he is disturbed at the thought ‘‘of a delicate young girl lounging away the evening in this nest of malaria’’ (DM, 83). He reproves Giovanelli for bringing the young American to the historic site, noted for its brutal gladiatorial clashes of class and color, and questions how ‘‘you, a native Roman [could] . . . countenance such a terrible indiscretion.’’ The handsome ‘‘native’’ responds, ‘‘for myself, I am not afraid,’’ to which Winterbourne retorts: ‘‘Neither am I—for you! I am speaking for this young lady.’’ Giovanelli explains, ‘‘with docility,’’ ‘‘I told the Signorina it was a grave indiscretion.’’ But Daisy, now ‘‘the Signorina’’ (DM, 83), a reference to her ethnic taint, is further contaminated by her behavior. She claims, ‘‘I don’t care . . . whether I have Roman fever or not!’’ but she falls ‘‘alarmingly ill’’ (DM, 85). Winterbourne, condescending to visit her, discovers that the ‘‘low-lived foreigner’’ is behaving in accordance with his lack of breeding, as Mrs. Miller moans that ‘‘Mr. Giovanelli hasn’t been near us since she was taken ill. I thought he was so much of a gentleman; but I don’t call that very polite!’’ (DM, 86). Daisy, unable to recover either culturally or physically, dies from her ‘‘terrible case of fever’’ (DM, 86). At the Protestant cemetery where she is bur-

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ied, notably separating her, at least in death, from Roman Catholicism, Winterbourne meets with Giovanelli, who now explains, ‘‘For myself I had no fear; and she wanted to go.’’ Winterbourne quickly charges, ‘‘That was no reason!’’ Then, ‘‘the subtle Roman dropped his eyes,’’ and acknowledges: ‘‘If she had lived, I should have got nothing. She would never have married me, I am sure’’ (DM, 87). Daisy’s own deathbed admission to Winterbourne that she was ‘‘not engaged,’’ along with Giovanelli’s assertions of her innocence (DM, 87), work to resituate her memory within the bounds of whiteness; however, she can be reclaimed only after she has paid the final price. Inscribed on Daisy’s body, then, are cultural mores relating to appropriate behavior, but more to the point, here, are warnings as to the physical dangers of miscegenatory alliances. The pollution of the body politic, signaled in Daisy’s fatal illness, attests to the fears that surround interethnic mixing and stands as further testimony to the rigid boundaries and codes of purity, contagion, and racial dis-ease. Roderick Hudson (1875), written three years earlier, offers a paradigm similar to that in Daisy Miller. The anxieties over ethnic miscegenation evident in the later novella are also apparent in this novel, and with comparable results. In Roderick Hudson, the title character meets with his death in Switzerland (a country that was not particularly kind to Daisy either), but it is Rome, and particularly its embodiment in the Roman femme fatale Christina Light, that ‘‘infects’’ Roderick with a fatal malady of depression, degeneration, and dissipation. Although Roderick was raised in New England, when Rowland Mallet first meets him in Northampton, his appearance is curiously evocative of the American South. Written precisely ten years after the conclusion of the Civil War, it is significant that Rowland likens Roderick’s hat to ‘‘the traditional property of the Virginian or Carolinian of romance.’’ 14 This reference to the stereotypical garb of the antebellum South is reinforced by Hudson’s lineage, for he is the son of a ‘‘Virginian gentleman of good estates’’ (RH, 184). The South, particularly in this period, and particularly for a writer like James, who grew up surrounded by famed abolitionists, is a site redolent of significations of white supremacy and racial ‘‘purity’’; thus, the concomitant emphasis placed on Roderick’s color cannot simply be coincidental. Rowland is struck by Roderick’s ‘‘fair, slim youth’’ (RH, 181), and the sculptor’s ‘‘fairness’’ is further underscored by his ability to blush (RH, 183, 196) and ‘‘flush’’ (RH, 189). Moreover, the color ‘‘white’’ recurs in Hudson’s description: He lives in a ‘‘large white house,’’ with a mother who wears a ‘‘white apron’’ (RH, 189– 90); his fiance´e, Mary Garland, often dresses in white (RH, 202), wears a white rose in her hair (RH, 252),

and ‘‘blushes’’ (RH, 210) and ‘‘colors a little’’ (RH, 203). In accordance with their insular rural background, Roderick’s friends and family find the thought of Rome distasteful. Roderick explains that ‘‘in [his] mother’s vocabulary,’’ ‘‘Rome is an evil word . . . to be said in a whisper, as you’d say ‘damnation.’ Northampton is in the centre of the earth and Rome far away in outlying dusk, into which it can do no Christian any good to penetrate’’ (RH, 195). One particular Christian is quite eager to penetrate it, and Roderick, once enticed to Rome, is entranced with the Eternal City: ‘‘The stagnant Roman air is charged with convention; it colors the yellow light and deepens the chilly shadows’’ (RH, 227). Thrilled with the comparison Rome offers to his native New England (which, if Rome is stagnant, is, by implicit contrast, presumably thriving with life—a comparison in direct opposition to its portrayal in the novel), Roderick declares that ‘‘Rome made him feel and understand more things than he could express: ‘‘He was sure that life must have there, for all one’s senses, an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must happen to one than anywhere else’’ (RH, 227). Although Roderick, much like Milly Theale after him, desires to live life to the fullest, his behavior begins to cause Rowland to reflect that Roderick meant to live freely and largely, and be as interested as occasion demanded. Rowland saw no reason to regard this as a menace of dissipation, because, in the first place, there was in all dissipation, refine it as one might, a grossness which would disqualify it for Roderick’s favor, and because, in the second, the young sculptor was a man to regard all things in the light of his art, to hand over his passions to his genius to be dealt with, and to find that he could live largely enough without exceeding the circle of wholesome curiosity. (RH, 227–28)

However, Rowland’s dismissal of the ‘‘menace of dissipation’’ to his prote´ge´ starts to waver when Roderick meets Christina Light. Unlike Roderick’s upright American fiance´e, Christina is a ‘‘tired princess’’ with a ‘‘mass of dusky hair’’ (RH, 229). She is ‘‘a daughter of the elder world’’ (RH, 230), the progeny of an American mother and an Italian father, who was raised in Rome and throughout Europe. Roderick first says of her that ‘‘[i]f beauty is immoral, as people think at Northampton . . . she is the incarnation of evil’’ (RH, 230). Hence, unlike the daughter of the Puritans he leaves behind, Christina is foreign, exotic, and bewitching. Roderick makes Christina’s acquaintance, and her affinity with Rome

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is apparent when the city’s atmosphere becomes foreboding. Roderick discovers on his walks around the city: As you pass away from the dusky, swarming purlieus of the Ghetto, you emerge into a region of empty, soundless, grass-grown lanes and alleys, where the shabby houses seem mouldering away in disuse, and yet your footstep brings figures of startling Roman type to the doorways. There are few monuments here, but no part of Rome seemed more historic, in the sense of being weighted with a crushing past, blighted with the melancholy of things that had had their day. (RH, 344) 148

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In effect, the dangers of Rome are displaced onto Christina, who is both beautiful and ‘‘dangerous’’ (RH, 229). A commodity to be cherished, much like the city with which she is associated (particularly in the nineteenth century, when wealthy American tourists scoured it for treasures to export), Christina’s value is stressed by her mother, who boasts: ‘‘I have raised money on that girl’s face! I’ve taken her to the Jews and bade her put up her veil, and asked if the mother of that young lady was not safe!’’ (RH, 329). Christina’s background curiously resonates with Roderick’s, as the sculptor, the son of a plantation owner, is confronted with a woman whose mother resembles a slave merchant: ‘‘Rowland had never been in the East, but if he had attempted to make a sketch of an old slavemerchant, calling attention to the ‘points’ of a Circassian beauty, he would have depicted such a smile as Mrs. Light’s’’ (RH, 283). In keeping with these descriptions, the rest of the novel is devoted to Roderick’s efforts to ‘‘possess’’ Christina. One of these efforts takes place at the Colosseum. Where in Daisy Miller the Roman landmark was the site of Daisy’s fatal infection, in Roderick Hudson it is the locus of a near-death experience. Roderick places himself in peril to secure a flower for Christina, and although he survives his climb up the crumbling walls of the Colosseum (RH, 340 – 41), his feats of daring mistakenly lead him to believe that he has won his princess. Rowland later finds Roderick in his room, in a scene brimming with hedonistic pleasure: The carpets and rugs had been removed, the floor of speckled concrete was bare and lightly sprinkled with water. Here and there, over it, certain strongly perfumed flowers had been scattered. Roderick was lying on his divan in a white dressing-gown, staring up at the

frescoed ceiling. The room was deliciously cool, and filled with the moist, sweet odor of the circumjacent roses and violets. (RH, 424)

Rowland is alarmed at Roderick’s behavior and likens him to ‘‘a Buddhist in an intellectual swoon’’ (RH, 424). Alternatively, this scene also points to a Pateresque ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ bent in Roderick, as well as to a divergent reading of Roderick Hudson, first advanced by Robert K. Martin, that the text recounts the story of a doomed homosexual love.15 In either reading of the work, it is striking that Roderick’s whiteness, especially in this Orientalist setting, continues to be highlighted: Roderick ‘‘was smelling a large white rose, and he continued to present it to his nose. In the darkness of the room he looked exceedingly pale’’ (RH, 424). When Roderick discovers that he has lost Christina, he succumbs to an overwhelming depression, and his mother and fiance´e are summoned to help. They blame his demise on the Italian city, which Mary finds a ‘‘ponderously sad place. . . . If one is idle, surely it is depressing to live, year after year, among the ashes of things that once were mighty’’ (RH, 395). Indeed, Roderick begins to echo Mary’s response when he notes, ‘‘If I had not come to Rome, I wouldn’t have risen, and if I had not risen, I shouldn’t have fallen’’ (RH, 451). Ultimately, Roderick rejects Rome, crying: ‘‘Take me out of this land of impossible beauty and put me in the midst of ugliness. Set me down where nature is coarse and flat, and men and manners are vulgar’’ (RH, 467). But he cannot escape the Rome that is in Christina, and seeing her with her new husband in Switzerland, he admits to Rowland that he has been ‘‘hideous’’ and is ‘‘damned’’ (RH, 502) just before he walks to his fate over the crest of a Swiss hill (RH, 503). Much like Daisy after him, Roderick’s death places him back within the bounds of whiteness. In death, his body is purified by the rain, for ‘‘his clothes and hair were as wet as if the billows of the ocean had flung him upon the strand’’ (RH, 509); as the ‘‘pure’’ Swiss rain washes away the taint of Rome and Christina, Roderick wears ‘‘a strangely serene expression of life’’ and ‘‘looked admirably handsome’’ (RH, 509–10). His body is removed to the safe harbor of New England, and consequently, just as in Daisy Miller, the body politic with which the novel is concerned is saved from the threat of ethnic corruption. In The Portrait of a Lady, the corruption of the body politic is not so easily subdued. Unlike the earlier texts, the illness portrayed here is located in England, but it is still Rome that induces the more serious contagion. Isabel Archer, like Roderick Hudson before her, meets with

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the death of her ideals in Rome, and thus, although Rome is not a site of infection per se, it is the place where Isabel realizes she has been deceived and exploited for her money; the Italian city, therefore, becomes the performative scene of her misfortunes. A brief comparison between Isabel’s initial encounter with Europe and her later home in Rome illuminates the differences established in the novel between a ‘‘safe’’ England and a ‘‘dangerous’’ Italy. Isabel’s first trip to Europe begins at her uncle’s estate, Gardencourt. Her English idyll is set, consequently, against a backdrop of sunshine and promise: 150

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Privacy here reigned supreme, and the wide carpet of turf that covered the level hill-top seemed but the extension of a luxurious interior. The great still oaks and beeches flung down a shade as dense as that of velvet curtains; and the place was furnished, like a room, with cushioned seats, with rich-coloured rugs, with the books and papers that lay upon the grass. The river was at some distance; where the ground began to slope the lawn, properly speaking, ceased. But it was none the less a charming walk down to the water.16

Although Gardencourt is where Isabel’s uncle and cousin will die (and hence the estate serves as an axis of sickness), it is hardly foreboding or threatening. Rome, however, is—it seethes with a history of treachery and perfidy, reflected in ‘‘the poison of the Roman air, which in November lay, notoriously, much in wait’’ (PL, 355). The contrast between the two settings offers an implicit suggestion that the illness of England is nonthreatening whereas the threat embodied in Rome is omnipresent. In keeping with this textual movement, the description offered of Isabel’s marital home, the Palazzo Roccanera, is brooding and ominous. The following is delivered by a scorned suitor whose perception is clearly colored by his own misery, but the grimness of Isabel’s Roman abode cannot be ignored: a domestic fortress, a pile which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence, which was mentioned in ‘‘Murray’’ and visited by tourists who looked, on a vague survey, disappointed and depressed, and which had frescoes by Caravaggio in the piano nobile and a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns in the wide, nobly-arched loggia overhanging the damp court where a fountain gushed out of a mossy niche. (PL, 362)

If, so to speak, the sun of Gardencourt sets on Isabel’s Rome, the change in Isabel’s appearance also reinforces the idea of her lost idealism. At Gardencourt, Isabel strikes her cousin as ‘‘a tall girl in a black dress, who at first sight looked pretty. She was bare-headed. . . . She was looking at everything, with an eye that denoted clear perception’’ (PL, 27–28). In Rome, her innocence is markedly absent and her immediate interest in her surroundings dimmed: She was dressed in black velvet. . . . The years had touched her only to enrich her; the flower of her youth had not faded, it only hung more quietly on its stem. She had lost something of that quick eagerness to which her husband had privately taken exception—she had more the air of being able to wait. Now, at all events, framed in the gilded doorway, she struck our young man as the picture of a gracious lady. (PL, 365)

Isabel does not appear to commingle with the Romans, as do Daisy and Roderick, but her marriage to the Italian-based American Gilbert Osmond leads her to despair. The Osmonds’ union brings her no more pleasure than do the potential alliances of her predecessors, and although the two deaths depicted in this novel take place in England, both are expected and even welcomed. Yet the offstage death of Isabel’s infant son in Rome is a tragedy, suggesting that the fruit of Isabel’s union is condemned, at the same time that his demise contains the Italian ‘‘taint’’ in one generation. Indeed, this taint is so pervasive that Isabel cannot escape it. Despite her early desire to live and experience all she can, Isabel discovers that her fate lies in Rome, to which she is doomed to return and to confront the loveless marriage that awaits her. An alternative reading of the novel’s conclusion, therefore, might be that Isabel has been contaminated by her stay in the Eternal City and thus must remain there, a prisoner of her past. In the early works discussed above, Rome and its representatives comprise a locus of contamination and illness. For Daisy Miller, the Roman cultural climate occasions a series of (sexual) transgressions that lead, ultimately, to her disease-induced death; for Roderick Hudson, that climate, especially as it is embodied in Christina Light, is so overwhelming as to rob him of his artistry and induce his early (self-inflicted?) demise; for Isabel Archer, the Italian climate, made manifest in Gilbert Osmond, to whom she submits, leads to the loss of her ideals and ruination of her life. These texts encode Rome as subordinate and Other, a threat to health and well-being, and a city

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that often proves fatal to those (Anglo) visitors who fall prey to its mystique. Italy and illness continue to haunt the Jamesian oeuvre in such works as The Aspern Papers, The Princess Casamassima (to some extent), and The Wings of the Dove, and although Rome itself does not reappear in James’s novels, it is an absent presence in The Golden Bowl, through the textually prominent Roman Prince Amerigo. Similar to its representation in The Portrait of a Lady, the contamination in this text is depicted as more psychical than physical, but it still emanates from the Italian capital and threatens to infect those who succumb to its promise. Whereas in the early works illness was located in a particular place, however, James’s last completed novel offers a divergent perception of disease and disease control. In The Golden Bowl, dis-ease emigrates and can no longer be contained in one setting, although it can be ‘‘carried’’ to and fro by a particular agent. There is a transition in constructions of illness in James’s novels, then, moving from a figurative site that generates sickness to a character as the source of corruption; this movement is in turn reflexive of a change in public awareness of contagion. As Alan Kraut and Judith Walzer Leavitt have argued, the nineteenth century witnessed sustained efforts apparent in various social and public sanitary projects to confine disease. Leavitt describes how outbreaks of ‘‘fatal epidemics periodically swept through . . . cities,’’ and left behind extraordinary debility, and often, complete civic disarray. Urbanites who could afford it fled their homes for the hoped for safety of the less crowded rural areas. . . . In response to the devastation from disease, especially epidemic disease, cities and states organized health departments whose functions included planning programs to obviate the worst of the disasters. Before the nineteenth century, health work remained haphazard and usually limited to epidemic emergencies: when an epidemic ended, health boards would be disbanded until the next one threatened. In the nineteenth century, however, urbanites, faced with increasing sanitation crises and devastating epidemics, began demanding a more systematic approach to disease control. Much of the work early in the century rested on the prevailing medical theory that dirt caused disease and emphasized keeping the city environment clean.17

Leavitt’s work is primarily concerned with the United States, but presumably these health concerns reached beyond its borders. Indeed, the passages from Italian Hours cited at the beginning of this essay indicate

James’s focalization of the dirt and lack of sanitation in Italy, which is also evident in his early fiction through characters, such as Daisy or Roderick, who fall ill as a result of Italian miasmas (of one sort or another). On a more general level, though, nineteenth-century America was the site of mass immigration, which magnified an already recurrent fear of immigrants. As Kraut notes, ‘‘the health menace posed by the foreign born’’ generated, in Leavitt’s words, ‘‘America’s long history of fear of contamination from abroad, a medicalized nativism,’’ which led to anti-immigration sentiment often levied against ‘‘southern and eastern Europeans.’’ 18 Around the time The Golden Bowl was published, several ‘‘breakthroughs’’ in disease detection occurred. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch ‘‘revolutionized medical theory about the causes of epidemic disease, substituting microorganisms for undifferentiated filth as the culprit.’’ 19 With these discoveries came changes in public health policy, deflecting the blame for epidemics from lack of sanitation to particular individuals. In 1902, Charles Chapin, superintendent of health for Providence, Rhode Island, published an impassioned article in which he announced that the new bacteriological theories ‘‘drove the last nail in the coffin of the old filth theory of disease.’’ 20 What this meant, in practice, was that by 1902 disease assumed a new ‘‘look,’’ as medical narratives shifted from their ‘‘old’’ focus on disease as an emanation of dirt (which had resulted in a rise in standards of environmental cleanliness) to a new focus on specific people as ‘‘carriers’’ of disease. The infamous account of Mary Mallon, or ‘‘Typhoid Mary,’’ provides a case in point. Mallon was an Irish immigrant who made her living as a cook; she was also, it was later discovered, a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. Mallon was apprehended by public health officials in 1907 and held in an isolation ward on North Brother Island for three years. Her identity was made public in 1909, when she, backed by the Hearst newspaper chain, made a bid for release. She was consequently freed but reapprehended in 1915 and isolated until her death in 1938 (spending twenty-six years in isolation). Typhoid Mary’s predicament exemplifies the alterations in perceptions of illness from the positing of responsibility for epidemics on public filth to the targeting of particular people (often immigrants). Although there is no evidence to indicate James’s awareness of Mallon’s situation,21 the perceptions of dis-ease in his last novel, which is replete with immigrations and interethnic marriages, mirrors the changes in cultural constructions of infection. As a result, this text, with its trans-

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national theme and its characterization of efforts to transport maladies to ‘‘innocent’’ nations, both supplements and counterpoints the racial constructions of Daisy Miller and Roderick Hudson. On one level, The Golden Bowl reiterates the idea of Italian corruption through the relations of Prince Amerigo, Maggie Verver, Adam Verver, and Charlotte Stant (who is, interestingly, an Italian-born American 22). Because Charlotte and the Prince have had a previous liaison, the novel opens against a backdrop of Italy and illicit love. Like Isabel Archer, the innocent Maggie must come to terms with her husband’s affair, in the process losing her innocence but ultimately, and unlike Isabel, triumphing over the adulterers by plotting Charlotte’s exile to America. On another level, The Golden Bowl moves beyond the constructions of Roman infection in the earlier works, complicating and nuancing their movements through its transnational locus.23 Effectively, The Golden Bowl dramatizes how Rome moves to England, and potentially to America, becoming a force that must be confronted, managed, and controlled. The Prince, who represents an ‘‘assimilated’’ Roman, is described in terms that alter the racial encodings examined thus far, in that his characterization is quite different from, say, Mr. Giovanelli’s in Daisy Miller. Certainly, class is an important factor in the Prince’s characterization, as is his association with England, which seems to modify and obfuscate the racial stigma he bears. The Prince is ‘‘one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber’’ (GB, 29). Preferring the simulated Rome that is England to the ‘‘real’’ Rome that he has left behind (and thereby demonstrating his ‘‘superior’’ judgment), the Prince’s Romanness is tempered by his Anglophilia: [H]e recognized in the present London much more than in contemporary Rome the real dimensions of such a case. If it was a question of an Imperium, he said to himself, and if one wished, as a Roman, to recover a little the sense of that, the place to do so was on London Bridge, or even, on a fine afternoon in May, at Hyde Park Corner. (GB, 29)

The Prince, accordingly, is less suspect in manner than his earlier Roman counterparts, and his racial markings oscillate in their connotative significations. The Prince is both assimilated and ‘‘domesticated’’ through his love for and acceptance of England, as he concomitantly remains disparate and Other: He ‘‘was somehow full of his race. Its presence in him was like the consciousness of some inexpugnable scent

in which his clothes, his whole person, his hands and the hair of his head, might have been steeped as in some chemical bath’’ (GB, 38). If the Prince ‘‘smells’’ of Rome, an odor redolent of a chemical bath, he is certainly ‘‘not-English’’ and is, at one point, described as having the appearance of ‘‘a ‘refined’ Irishman’’ (GB, 30). It is tempting to see this odd comparison of a Roman to an Irishman as an oblique reference to Mary Mallon, but because the analogy occurs in the first edition of The Golden Bowl, published in 1904, it was written before Mallon was apprehended. Nonetheless, the Prince’s affinity with the Irish works to consolidate his similarity to the bulk of nineteenth-century American immigrants, hailing from Ireland and southern Europe. The association points both to the Prince’s affinity with the United Kingdom and to his difference from it, for his resemblance to those from England’s muchmaligned and much-derided imperial possession continues to render him suspect. Consequently, although the Prince shows the good taste of preferring his life in London to his old life in Italy, he expresses a sentiment in keeping with the expectations of James’s audience given the industrial nations’ discursive denotations as places to relocate in order to improve one’s lot. As the Prince notes: [H]is old Roman life had had more poetry, no doubt, but as he looked back upon it now it seemed to hang in the air of mere iridescent horizons, to have been loose and vague and thin, with large languorous unaccountable blanks. The present order, as it spread about him, had somehow the ground under its feet, and a trumpet in its ears, and a bottomless bag of solid shining British sovereigns—which was much to the point—in its hand. (GB, 251)

The Prince’s openness to the money and affluence that accrue from his life in England is in accord with the construction of southern Europeans as searching for a ‘‘better life’’ in England and America. Indeed, in the spirit of the fin de sie`cle, this novel demonstrates how money can buy almost anything (including a ‘‘bona fide’’ prince for an American heiress). Maggie Verver, the heiress in question, is not a particularly ruthless character until she marries the Prince. Whereas Amerigo becomes Anglicized, Maggie, through her marriage, becomes stereotypically ‘‘Italianized’’—in a Machiavellian sense. Maggie’s machinations in manipulating her father and stepmother’s return to America are internecine, and the modification in her temperament points to how the effects of Italy can no longer be contained within its borders, for intermarriage spreads cultural heritages both ways. Her actions, when she discovers

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that the Florentine-born Charlotte and her husband have continued their affair (GB, 237), have led critics to condemn her behavior (even more than the Prince’s), and certainly, the ‘‘taint’’ in this novel is not simply contained within the racialized otherness of Italian birth; rather, it has spread to the ‘‘innocents,’’ much as disease was perceived as spreading to ‘‘innocent’’ victims. Interestingly, in a scene critics often overlook, The Golden Bowl explicitly points to the increase of transnationalism in Western industrialized countries. Early in the novel, the Prince and Charlotte enter an antique shop in search of a wedding present for Maggie. As they examine a golden bowl, the two speak to each other candidly in Italian. They ignore the shop owner, because, for the Prince: ‘‘One kind of shopman was just like another to him. . . . He took throughout, always, the meaner sort for granted—the night of their meanness or whatever name one might give it for him made all his cats grey’’ (GB, 99). The Prince’s aristocratic dismissal of his ‘‘inferiors’’ leads to his own later detection by Maggie, for the shop owner speaks Italian. Translating for her what the Prince and Charlotte have said, the shopkeeper crossculturally ‘‘carries’’ their conversation to Maggie, providing her with the evidence she seeks of her husband’s betrayal. Hence, the shopkeeper is a performative carrier of the news that will contaminate Maggie’s innocence, as he also points to the inefficacy of efforts to arrest infection. This scene emphasizes The Golden Bowl’s divergence from a simple condemnation of the Roman threat to American innocence to a more broadly based acknowledgment of international exchanges, since the shopkeeper’s presence foregrounds transnational movements. Figuring the immigration of people across Europe and to America, the shopkeeper demonstrates the impossibility of containing ethnic and racial ‘‘taints’’—just as the Prince’s conversation with Charlotte cannot be contained. Maggie works to move the threat to her marriage to another country, maneuvering Charlotte’s exile to America, and thus acts in a manner similar to the New York health officials who targeted Typhoid Mary and exiled her. By confining the threat to one person, Maggie is able to put her own life in order, but in so doing, she spreads the transmission of dis-ease across national borders. Her actions also allow for other transnational movements, for Maggie suggests to the Prince that they go together to Rome, and the very existence of their son, the ‘‘Principino,’’ exemplifies the fruits of interethnic mixing. The seeming resolutions of the conclusion here, when read alongside the other Roman texts, become much more ambiguous. If Maggie goes to Rome, will she fall prey to malaria, like Daisy? Will she lose her will

to live, like Roderick? Will her son die, like Isabel’s? The reader cannot know, but the suggestion that Maggie has somehow rid herself of the threats to her person by relegating Charlotte to America only begs further questions that the text does not answer—perhaps because it cannot. Through its inability to resolve these issues, however, The Golden Bowl mitigates the threat of works such as Daisy Miller, where the textual warning is clear in its implication that one can glance but not embrace, or one can look but not touch; or those of Roderick Hudson and The Portrait of a Lady, where, if tourists decide to go ‘‘native,’’ their decision may well lead to death and exile. In James’s last completed novel, the previous efforts to localize disease prove an insufficient means of control; contagion, like information, cannot be confined so easily, either in a person or in a place. Read in this light, The Golden Bowl appears to be an extraordinarily contemporary novel, for in its extensions and reversals of James’s earlier writings, it foreshadows the problems facing another fin de sie`cle, wherein globalization assumes new meanings and continued efforts at containment prove increasingly futile—especially for those who seek to limit and constrict physical and psychical migrations.

notes 1. Henry James, Hawthorne, Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 465– 66. 2. Letters of Henry James, vol. 1, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974–1984), 178. 3. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 180. 4. Ibid., 57. 5. Ibid., 12–13. 6. Ibid., 180, 28. 7. Henry James, Italian Hours (New York: Grove Press, nd.), 456. Subsequent quotations will appear in the text as IH. 8. Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3. 9. Vrettos, 3; Julia Epstein, Altered Conditions: Disease, Medicine, and Storytelling (London: Routledge, 1995), 8. 10. Epstein, Altered Conditions, 8– 9. 11. Dyer, White, 75–76. 12. Henry James, Daisy Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 14. Subsequent references will appear in the text as DM. 13. Mary Ann O’Farrell, Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), passim.

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14. Roderick Hudson, Henry James: Novels 1871–1880, ed. William T. Stafford (New York: Library of America, 1983), 182. Subsequent references will appear in the text as RH. 15. See Robert Martin, ‘‘The ‘High Felicity’ of Comradeship: A New Reading of Roderick Hudson,’’ American Literary Realism 11 (1978): 100 –108. 16. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (London: Everyman, 1995), 18–19. The Everyman edition reproduces the 1881 edition of the novel and will be cited in the text as PL. 17. Judith Walzer Leavitt, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 21–22. See also Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the ‘‘Immigrant Menace’’ (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 18. Kraut, Silent Travelers, 117. 19. Leavitt, Typhoid Mary, 23. 20. ‘‘Dirt, Disease and the Health Officer,’’ Papers of Charles V. Chapin, M.D.: A Review of Public Health Realities, ed. Clarence L. Scamman (New York: The Commonwealth Fund, 1934), 21–22. 21. It would, though, be odd if he had not heard of it, given its extensive press coverage in 1909—the year in which he revised The Golden Bowl for the New York edition. 22. Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 64. Subsequent references will appear in the text as GB. 23. I am indebted to David Leverenz, who opened for me this line of inquiry in his paper ‘‘Capitalist Paternalism: James’s Gospel of Consciousness and Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth,’’ delivered at the 1998 conference of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco.

Adam Parkes

henry james’s Italian Hours and the ‘‘ruskinian contagion’’

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In 1909 Henry James assembled his essays on Italian culture, which he had written during the previous thirty-seven years, for a new volume called Italian Hours. Taken together in this fashion, these essays seem to form an Italian companion piece to James’s recent volume of American reflections, The American Scene (1907); like the American book, James’s Italian collection offers the reader a series of impressions that had developed in his mind over time. Arranging the Italian essays not in order of composition or publication but according to the personal significance of certain cities and regions, James highlighted what he had earlier called the ‘‘wild logic’’ of the impressions themselves,1 which thus appeared to dictate his decision to begin with Venice and conclude, by way of Rome, Florence, and various other cities, with the Bay of Naples. Broadly speaking, this spatial or geographical trajectory correlates with a movement from the decay of old Italy—for which Venice serves not simply as a synecdoche but as a preeminent metaphor—to the modern, secular world of post-Unification Italy, which is exemplified by Rome and, later and more positively, by Naples. James also intends, no doubt, to reflect a certain temporal wildness in his impressions—a wildness in the sinuous operations of memory but also in the time-keeping practices of nineteenth-century Italy.2 Yet James’s retrospective arrangement of his Italian impressions was not only a reflection of their own ‘‘wild logic.’’ It served certain rhetorical ends as well—specifically, James’s attempt to rewrite the version of Italy that he had encountered in the works of one of his great Victorian forerunners, John Ruskin. In saying this, I do not mean to dismiss the numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century precursors to whom previous critics have rightly pointed (Goethe, Byron, Browning,

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Stendhal, Gautier, Hawthorne, Howells, and others).3 But Ruskin, in particular, was unavoidable for any nineteenth-century English-speaking visitor to Italy. If only in terms of direct references, Ruskin is a dominant precursor, his work a crucial intertext. In writing on Italian art and architecture, James was self-consciously treading in Ruskin’s footsteps; wherever he looked, it seemed, Ruskin had preceded him. For James, any late Victorian encounter with Italian culture was necessarily mediated, or infected, by the inevitable experience of having read Ruskin on Italy. Consequently, in order to convey the possibility of a fresh, personal response to this country, James felt it necessary to dispel what he called ‘‘the Ruskinian contagion.’’ 4 At the same time, James appears to feel that do what he will, this contagion is inescapable and therefore that any modern engagement with Italy must occur at the level of representation. Rather than having direct access to Italy, that is, James’s modern traveler views the country through a series of screens. Insofar as these screens are often specifically Ruskinian, one might say that for James, reading Ruskin means submitting oneself to a kind of screening process that is in some ways disabling and in other ways productive. Such a double-sided, or divided, reaction to Ruskin, I will argue, informs the printing and reprinting of James’s own Italian impressions. As other critics have remarked, James’s response to Ruskin was not all negative. On the contrary, James inherited some of Ruskin’s moralism, as we see in the third piece in Italian Hours, ‘‘Venice: An Early Impression’’ (originally published in 1873). James’s account of Tintoretto, whose ‘‘indefatigable hand never drew a line that was not, as one may say, a moral line’’ (IH, 55), sounds thoroughly Ruskinian.5 The point was not lost on Ruskin himself, as he praised the essay to his friend, and James’s former teacher at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton, who in turn informed James; the young American, duly gratified, sent Norton’s note to his father, asking him to guard it ‘‘privately and jealously’’ (L, 1 : 361). Even when James felt it necessary to express some ambivalence toward Ruskin, as in his 1878 essay on ‘‘Ruskin’s Collection of Drawings by Turner,’’ he credited him with ‘‘some of the most splendid pages in our language.’’ 6 The nature of James’s engagement with Ruskin looks a little different, however, when we note its significance for his own literary encounters with Italy. By placing his 1882 essay ‘‘Venice’’ at the beginning of Italian Hours, before even the 1873 essay (which he retitled ‘‘Venice: An Early Impression’’), James was not merely highlighting the preeminence of Venice in his response to the country as a whole; he was giving particular emphasis to his argument with Ruskin, tempting us to ask whether this is not a forecast of what we can expect throughout the

book. Having opened with a brief disclaimer about the impossibility and, paradoxically, undesirability of saying anything new about Venice, James turns directly to Ruskin, first acknowledging his debts to his precursor and then quarreling with him. James takes particular issue with what he regarded as the ‘‘ill-humorous’’ series of pamphlets, St. Mark’s Rest (1877–1884): Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but only after extracting half a lifetime of pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame from it. We all may do the same, after it has served our turn, which it probably will not cease to do for many a year to come. Meantime it is Mr. Ruskin who beyond any one helps us to enjoy. He has indeed lately produced several aids to depression in the shape of certain little humorous—ill-humorous—pamphlets (the series of St. Mark’s Rest) which embody his latest reflections on the subject of our city and describe the latest atrocities perpetrated there. These latter are numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit that they have spoiled Venice would be to admit that Venice may be spoiled—an admission pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortunately one reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose. (IH, 8)

James’s equivocal attitude toward Ruskin has given itself away by the time this passage has reached the first semicolon, which not only precedes an early note of dissension (‘‘but’’) but also provides the necessary pause that establishes an air of calm reflection, a sense of balance, that stands in contrast to the perceived extremity of Ruskin’s characteristic tone. In the third sentence James quietly emphasizes this ambivalence by declining to give a direct object for the transitive verb ‘‘enjoy,’’ which is thus left hanging in an awkwardly infinitive state. What, precisely, does Ruskin help us to enjoy? The following sentences suggest that, if anything, Ruskin himself is to be enjoyed—as the butt of a Jamesian joke. The only spoiling Venice has suffered, James implies, is the result of the contagion that Ruskin has brought to it; happily, the disease has not spread beyond the margins of Ruskin’s book. In a final irony, the strenuously moralistic critic turns out to be the agent of a demoralization that affects only himself. If readers catch the infection, Venice provides a ready antidote: ‘‘Fortunately one reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and one hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose.’’ James proves a resistant pupil because he cannot reconcile himself to what he considers to be Ruskin’s rigid and curiously overwrought meth-

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ods of teaching readers about Italian culture. Ruskin serves as a negative example in cultural and aesthetic pedagogy: ‘‘This queer late-coming prose of Mr. Ruskin . . . is all to be read, though much of it appears addressed to children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess’’ (IH, 8). James’s point is that Ruskin’s manly style of verbal observation tends to be too strenuous for his own good, causing it to sound strained, queer, even feminine: The schoolmaster begins to resemble a governess. James elaborated on this image of Ruskin as a failed, because rhetorically and sexually ambiguous, schoolteacher in another piece, ‘‘Recent Florence’’ (1878), which was reprinted in Italian Hours as ‘‘Italy Revisited.’’ James describes Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence (1875–1877) as ‘‘amusing little books’’ (no one else, to my knowledge, has called them that) and reiterates the point that Ruskin should not be taken too seriously: Nothing in fact is more comical than the familiar asperity of the author’s style and the pedagogic fashion in which he pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in corners and giving them Scripture texts to copy. . . . For many persons he will never bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, so long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, joyous, irresponsible. If the reader is in daily contact with those beautiful Florentine works which do still, in a way, force themselves into notice through the vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it will seem to him that this commentator’s comment is pitched in the strangest falsetto key. (IH, 116–17)

James’s response to Ruskin, which really is a caricature, goes some way toward undermining Ruskin’s claim to the role of Victorian sage and to the affirmation of masculine identity that, as James Eli Adams has shown, male Victorian writers sought to establish in their intellectual work; indeed, the point of James’s Italian excursions may be, in the words of another critic, ‘‘precisely this demoralization, an unmanning.’’ 7 Caricature serves James well in this context, of course, as it generates an implicit contrast that grants his own prose a sense of rhetorical mobility, of spontaneity and freedom, which he found lacking in Ruskin’s responses to Italy. Yet it should also be noted that what James turns into the aesthetic virtue of ‘‘irresponsibility’’ is revealed as deriving from features that, in Ruskin’s work, bespeak considerable rhetorical, as well as sexual, confusion.8

In James’s view, this strain in Ruskin’s critical attitude also manifested itself in the critic’s dispute with another American working in England, James McNeill Whistler—a dispute that was already underway when James wrote the sentences I have just quoted from Italian Hours. The controversy had arisen the previous year when Ruskin described Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (circa 1874) as the product of an ‘‘ill-educated conceit’’ that ‘‘approached the aspect of wilful imposture.’’ ‘‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now,’’ Ruskin declared in Fors Clavigera ( July 2, 1877), ‘‘but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’’ 9 Whistler then issued a libel suit, asking for one thousand pounds in damages; the case eventually went to court in November 1878, ending in a pyrrhic victory for the aggrieved artist (he was awarded contemptuous damages of one farthing). James published his impressions of this ‘‘singular and most regrettable exhibition’’ in The Nation (December 19, 1878): I confess to thinking it hard to decide what Mr. Whistler ought properly to have done, while—putting aside the degree of one’s appreciation of his works—I quite understand his resentment. Mr. Ruskin’s language quite transgresses the decencies of criticism, and he has been laying about him for some years past with such promiscuous violence that it gratifies one’s sense of justice to see him brought up as a disorderly character. On the other hand, he is a chartered libertine— he has possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold. His literary bad manners are recognized, and many of his contemporaries have suffered from them without complaining. It would very possibly, therefore, have been much wiser on Mr. Whistler’s part to feign indifference. (PE, 173–74)

James, it seems, felt quite divided, but one can certainly hear a note of impatience with Ruskin’s excesses, which corresponds with some important passages in the American’s travel writing. The description of Ruskin as a ‘‘disorderly character’’ and ‘‘chartered libertine’’ is hardly flattering; to call him a ‘‘general scold’’ is to anticipate the image of the ‘‘angry governess’’ in the 1882 essay on Venice. Intriguingly, images of the courtroom and the classroom converge in Italian Hours in James’s description of Ruskin’s characteristic posture. After describing Ruskin’s severely ‘‘pedagogic fashion,’’ James proceeds in the 1878 essay on Florence to depict him as a ‘‘Draconic’’ legislator. These comments, which imply that Ruskin’s cultural pedagogy concerns

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itself too exclusively with lawmaking, acquire additional force when reviewed in light of the actual legal dispute in which Ruskin was then entangled:

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Art is the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease. . . . One may read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin without getting a hint of this delightful truth. . . . And as for Mr. Ruskin’s world’s being a place—his world of art—where we may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of delight, he finds a sort of assize court in perpetual session. Instead of a place in which human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region governed by a kind of Draconic legislation. (IH, 117)

Resenting Ruskin’s perpetual talk of ‘‘error,’’ James insists that the world of art allows— or, paradoxically, prescribes—freedom from such narrow-mindedness: ‘‘A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place; the only thing absolute there is that some force and some charm have worked. The grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself; she feels this not to be her province.’’ If these observations sound reminiscent of Byron, who described Italy as ‘‘the garden of the world, the home / Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree,’’ 10 James waxes Paterian and Whistlerian when objecting that differences in the world of art ‘‘are not iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations of temperament, kinds of curiosity.’’ James ends this section of the essay on an unusually emphatic note of protest: ‘‘We are not under theological government’’ (IH, 117). James’s musings imply that although Whistler had taken the first step toward the courtroom by issuing a libel suit, it was the legislative (yet simultaneously transgressive) element of Ruskin’s aesthetics that had caused their dispute to take a legal turn. James hinted as much in his subsequent account of the trial, when he confessed ‘‘to thinking it hard to decide what Mr. Whistler ought properly to have done’’ in the face of Ruskin’s verbal assault. By insisting that artists and critics alike abide by his own rules and regulations, Ruskin had ridden roughshod over the usual ‘‘decencies of criticism’’ in a manner seemingly calculated to incite the litigious Whistler (PE, 173). In ‘‘Recent Florence’’ James elaborated a similar point by suggesting that Ruskin’s ‘‘Draconic legislation’’ entailed an inherently self-defeating attempt to make the world of art conform to ‘‘rigidities’’ that it was bound to resist. If the courtroom seemed an inappropriate place in which to carry on a dispute about art, James suggested that it was Ruskin’s rhetorical failure to observe the

boundary separating the aesthetic from the legal realm—his insistence, in fact, on crossing this boundary—that had brought them into collision. In different ways, this tension between lawmaking and libertarian tendencies, which was illustrated quite graphically in the 1878 trial, underlies the apparently opposed aesthetics of both Whistler and Ruskin, especially their efforts to educate the viewer in the art of seeing. Whistler’s paintings constituted an attempt to compel viewers to engage in a more active, self-conscious fashion with the art they encountered, as he made clear by eschewing the naturalistic and narrative tendencies of popular mid-nineteenth-century painters such as William Powell Frith in favor of an impressionist aesthetic of suggestiveness; this compulsory openness to interpretation was exploited in court by the counsel for Ruskin’s defense, Sir John Holker, who ridiculed Whistler’s art as pointlessly obscure.11 Ruskin’s writings aimed at a similar effect by providing rigorous, detailed guidelines to steer ordinary spectators through the gradual process of testing and comparing their impressions of art; ultimately, in Ruskin’s view, spectators should be able to judge and appreciate art for themselves. The major difference between Ruskin and Whistler, of course, was that the acts of visual interpretation encouraged by the critic entailed the application of rules that he himself had set down, whereas the painter virtually demanded that the viewer take more liberties. Ironically, Whistler’s offer of a large interpretative freedom was unwittingly echoed in James’s remarks on Ruskin, even though James remained reluctant to recognize Whistler’s paintings as inviting a flexible form of response (‘‘Mr. Whistler’s experiments have no relation whatever to life,’’ opined a frustrated James; ‘‘they have only a relation to painting’’ [PE, 143]).12 In a further irony, however, James detected the potential for such freedom in Ruskin’s writings. As Tony Tanner has remarked, ‘‘James maintains a continuous discrimination between Ruskin the matchless aesthetic appreciator and Ruskin the uncompromising ascetic judge.’’ 13 Despite expending considerable energy in his efforts to lay down the law, Ruskin seemed capable of displaying the very spontaneity and ‘‘irresponsibility’’ against which he was trying to legislate. Continuing his opening argument with Ruskin’s response to Venice, James wrote: It is, however, all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an inconceivable want of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them; but it throbs and flashes with the

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love of his subject. . . . There is no better reading at Venice therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological spirit, the moralism a` tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. (IH, 8)

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In James’s account, Ruskin’s prose embodies a kind of lawlessness that breaches the contract he is ostensibly seeking to foist on his readers. One way of taking James’s revision of Ruskin is to see it as an attempt to encourage that lawlessness and to liberate his predecessor’s finest insights from the dogmatic framework he had built around them—to rescue Ruskin from Ruskin. These paradoxes of freedom and legislation impressed themselves deeply on James’s critical and fictional writings of this period. By negotiating the various conflicts dramatized in the Whistler-Ruskin dispute, James forged a similarly complex and shifting rhetoric of literary freedom that provided the foundations of his own aesthetic practices. Such complexity marks James’s repudiation of the ‘‘contagion’’ of Ruskin’s excessive legislative tendencies. James’s observation that Ruskin had transgressed the ‘‘decencies of criticism’’ clearly implied a respect for the rule of a certain kind of law in aesthetic discourse. Describing the world of art as ‘‘the one corner of human life in which we may take our ease’’ and as an ‘‘escape’’ from everyday ‘‘convictions and prejudices,’’ James found the language of ‘‘rules and regulations’’ nonetheless unavoidable. ‘‘A truce to all rigidities is the law of the place,’’ James claimed, thereby conceding that the liberties he sought had to be prescribed (IH, 117). Indeed, James’s recourse to such Paterian terms as ‘‘temperament’’ and ‘‘curiosity’’ might be regarded less as a declaration of aesthetic and moral independence than as the observance of a different, perhaps even less forgiving, system of laws: the laws of individual personality. In turning from James’s commentary on Ruskin in Italian Hours to his observations on the legal dispute with Whistler, I have been providing, in a sense, a context for a context. This is an appropriate juncture at which to return to Italian Hours itself. At certain key moments in this volume, as we have seen, James argues quite vehemently with Ruskin, impressing on his readers his suspicion that here is a critical example to be resisted. In effect, James puts Ruskin on trial again, replaying the actual legal trial of 1878 to inculcate in his audience a ‘‘sense of justice’’ more refined, less dogmatic, than that encountered in Ruskin’s own works, let alone in the law courts. What this means, in practice, is a slackening of the rope that James has been drawing about Ruskin’s feet

(if not his neck) in the passages I have been examining. Although there are numerous other references to Ruskin in Italian Hours, there are no more sustained attacks; sometimes, there is even agreement with, or at least an echo of, the views of James’s British precursor. There are, or course, further instances of rope-tightening, as James continues to play prosecutor to Ruskin’s defendant. Some of the allusions to Ruskin are dismissive, all the more so because of their brevity, as we see when James praises Ghirlandaio—not a painter Ruskin admired in his later years (IH, 259).14 At other times, James is prepared to acknowledge Ruskin with no more than a hesitant nod: He is merely ‘‘tempted’’ to concur with Ruskin on the primary importance of mass in great architecture (IH, 82); he expresses but a ‘‘timid kindness’’ for the Palazzo Pesaro in Venice (IH, 45– 46), which Ruskin had described (grudgingly, perhaps, though not timidly) as the ‘‘most powerful and impressive in effect of all the palaces of the Grotesque Renaissance’’ ( JRW, 11: 398). In his very last direct reference to Ruskin, in his account of a visit to Lucca, James deliberately refrains from looking at the various churches with the discriminatory care that his precursor had demanded. James remembers Ruskin’s ‘‘so characteristically magnified rapture’’ but cannot, or will not, recall the particular church that inspired it (IH, 284).15 Elsewhere, however, slackening is very much in evidence, especially when James commends Ruskin’s views of particular works of art. On some occasions this approval is explicit, as in an allusion to Ruskin’s ‘‘sufficient eloquence’’ on the subject of Tintoretto’s The Marriage in Cana in the Salute (IH, 36). On other occasions James’s acquiescence in Ruskin’s judgment is only implicit but nonetheless transparent. One instance of such tacit agreement is James’s description of Torcello as ‘‘the mother-city of Venice,’’ which is a paraphrase of The Stones of Venice ( JRW, 10 :18). Another example is James’s disparagement of Guido Reni and Domenichino, in which he echoes Modern Painters ( JRW, 4 : 197). As far as this last case is concerned, James had already indulged in a preemptive parody of the schoolmasterly Ruskinian manner: He [Domenichino] is so supremely good an example of effort detached from inspiration and school-merit divorced from spontaneity, that one of his fine frigid performances ought to hang in a conspicuous place in every academy of design. Few things of the sort contain more urgent lessons or point a more precious moral; and I would have the head-master in the drawing-school take each ingenuous pupil by the hand and lead him up to the Triumph of David or the Chase of Diana or the red-nosed Persian Sibyl and make him some such little

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speech as the following: ‘‘This great picture, my son, was hung here to show you how you must never paint. . . .’’ (IH, 165– 66)

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As the comical tone of this passage shows (surely James is parodying his own Ruskinian tendencies, as well as Ruskin himself ), James’s retrial of John Ruskin seeks to deliver neither judgment nor, in the customary meaning of the term, justice. What James seems to want to convey is (to use a phrase in his report on the 1878 trial) a sense of justice—a sense more humane than the legal system in which Ruskin became embroiled and more accommodating and forgiving than the literary tribunal Ruskin himself created, in place of a ‘‘garden of delight,’’ in his writings. In one of the last direct references to Ruskin in Italian Hours, James writes:

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We do in fact as we grow older unstring the critical bow a little and strike a truce with invidious comparisons. We work off the juvenile impulse to heated partisanship and . . . perceive a certain human solidarity in all cultivated effort, and are conscious of a growing accommodation of judgment—an easier disposition, the fruit of experience, to take the joke for what it is worth as it passes. We have in short less of a quarrel with the masters we don’t delight in, and less of an impulse to pin all our faith on those in whom, in more zealous days, we fancied that we made our peculiar meanings. The meanings no longer seem quite so peculiar. (IH, 254–55)

James cannot help calling our attention to some of Ruskin’s most irritating habits—his drawing of ‘‘invidious’’ comparisons, his ‘‘heated partisanship,’’ his repeated incitement to controversy. But the younger critic, who was only thirty-one years old when he wrote these sentences, was willing to give up the quarrel and indicated this by noting that Ruskin, too, might be a perfectly unquarrelsome antidote to this ‘‘contagion.’’ Everything ‘‘depends vastly on one’s mood,’’ James remarked. ‘‘So it is that in museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives. On some days we ask but to be somewhat sensibly affected; on others, Ruskin-haunted, to be spiritually steadied’’ (IH, 255). James’s engagement with Ruskin’s Italy is not confined, of course, to Italian Hours. Although there is not space here to undertake a complete survey of this particular intertextual excursion, it might be apposite to end by considering briefly two other closely related texts in which James’s apprehension of Italy is shadowed by Ruskin’s presence: The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and the preface to the revised New York edition

of that novel, which was published in 1908 (the year before Italian Hours appeared). Together, the novel and the preface register an ambivalence toward Ruskin that corresponds closely to the complex attitude expressed in Italian Hours. Like Italian Hours, The Portrait of a Lady illuminates James’s response not simply to Italy itself but to previous responses and reveals his profound interest in Rome and Florence, where much of the novel’s action is set. Ruskin’s influence may be felt not only in the Portrait’s Italian setting, however; it emerges also in the character of Gilbert Osmond, a fictional version of the ‘‘Draconic’’ proclivities that James found in Ruskin’s Italian writings. This is not to say that Osmond is a fictional equivalent of Ruskin as such—surely the Paterian connections discerned by Adeline R. Tintner and others are stronger 16—but it is interesting, I think, to interpret some of Osmond’s characteristics and actions in light of his creator’s responses to Ruskin. For James’s Portrait does not merely use Italy as the ‘‘background,’’ as Carl Maves puts it, for a tale of human treachery; 17 the novel integrates the Italian setting into the intrigue that lies at the heart of the plot. In The Portrait of a Lady James hints at the sterilizing effect of Ruskin’s representation of Italy by describing two different ways of seeing the country, whose mutual contrast significantly shapes our understanding of the plot. The first view is of Italy as it initially appears to the naı¨ve young heroine, Isabel Archer; the second is of Italy as it appears after Isabel’s marriage to the unscrupulous expatriate American Gilbert Osmond. From the first perspective, Italy seems to be an ideal setting for the romantic heroine’s pursuit of freedom—hence young Isabel’s receptiveness to Osmond’s observation that living in Italy produces ‘‘certain impressions [that] you could get only there,’’ and hence their decision to marry in Italy: ‘‘It was in Italy that they had met, Italy had been a party to their first impressions of each other, and Italy should be a party to their happiness.’’ 18 The second view of Italy concentrates on Osmond’s Roman mansion, the Palazzo Roccanera, which embodies what James found limiting and repellent in Ruskin’s version of Italy. That an entire culture may be reduced so readily to a view of one house alerts us, perhaps, to the withering effect of Osmond’s pervasive and ‘‘Ruskinhaunted’’ influence. To be sure, Isabel is subdued so thoroughly by Osmond’s machinations that she becomes inadequate to the task of describing them, forcing the narrator to turn instead to her cousin, and the suitor of Osmond’s daughter Pansy, Ned Rosier, through whose ‘‘apprehensive mind’’ he filters this account of the Palazzo: ‘‘[It was] a palace by Roman measure, but a dungeon to poor Rosier’s apprehensive mind. It seemed to him of evil omen that the young lady he wished to

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marry, and whose fastidious father he doubted of his ability to conciliate, should be immured in a kind of domestic fortress, a pile which bore a stern old Roman name, which smelt of historic deeds, of crime and craft and violence’’ (PL, 307). The implicit contrast between the cramped moral and psychological quarters of Osmond’s Palazzo and the country Byron addressed as ‘‘the garden of the world’’ is itself quite violent. The appalling irony is that nothing has really changed, either in Osmond or in the Palazzo. From the beginning, Osmond has been the object of a general skepticism, even hostility, that has united everyone except Isabel (even his co-conspirator, Madame Merle, finally realizes how he has exploited and betrayed her). The very first description of the Palazzo, moreover, strikes a menacing note by recording its ‘‘incommunicative character’’ and defiantly ‘‘blank-looking’’ fac¸ade and by remarking the ‘‘narrow’’ garden, the ‘‘parapet’’ around the terrace, and the ‘‘massively cross-barred’’ windows (PL, 195– 96). What alters in the course of the narration is Isabel’s perception of Osmond and, with it, her perception of Italy. Her tragedy is to see too late what everyone else has seen long before. Read in the context of James’s other Italian writings, Isabel’s fate seems designed to caution us against a Ruskinian fastidiousness whose apparent benignity conceals an austere and ultimately hypocritical code of misconduct. The 1908 preface suggests a less severe, because more equivocal, attitude to Ruskin, but it, too, contains a tacit warning against simple compliance with Ruskin’s rulings. James dwells with high intensity on Venice, the place where much of the first version of The Portrait of a Lady was written and the subject of his initial and subsequent public attempts to cross swords with Ruskin. Before James is able to discuss ‘‘the germ of [his] idea’’ for the novel (PL, 4), he finds himself distracted by recollections of this city. He recalls that the sounds of Venice constantly drew him to the windows of the house in which he was building his fiction, making him wonder whether, as he stood there, ‘‘the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn’t come into sight,’’ but serving, in fact, to distract him from his task. ‘‘I recall vividly enough,’’ James adds, ‘‘that the response most elicited, in general, to these restless appeals was the rather grim admonition that romantic and historic sites, such as the land of Italy abounds in, offer the artist a questionable aid to concentration when they themselves are not to be the subject of it. They are too rich in their own life and too charged with their own meanings merely to help him out with a lame phrase’’ (PL, 3). James’s own rereading of the Portrait has deepened this impression:

There are pages of the book which, in the reading over, have seemed to make me see again the bristling curve of the wide Riva [Schiavoni], the large colour-spots of the balconied houses and the repeated undulation of the little hunchbacked bridges, marked by the rise and drop again, with the wave, of foreshortened clicking pedestrians. The Venetian footfall and the Venetian cry—all talk there, wherever uttered, having the pitch of a call across the water— come in once more at the window, renewing one’s old impression of the delighted senses and the divided, frustrated mind. (PL, 3– 4)

In the ‘‘large colour-spots’’ and sounds of this passage, James is remembering— or his prose is remembering—the ‘‘little mental picture’’ that had painted itself in his mind, with Ruskin’s help, at the mention of the ‘‘magical name’’ of Venice and that he had tried to reproduce in his essay of 1882: I simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city—a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall. The gondola moves slowly; it gives a great smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the gondolier’s cry, carried over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the stillness. A girl crosses the little bridge, which has an arch like a camel’s back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes her characteristic and charming; you see her against the sky as you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to fill the whole place; it sinks even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a garden, out of which the long arm of a white June rose—the roses of Venice are splendid—has flung itself by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other side of this small water-way is a great shabby fac¸ade of Gothic windows and balconies—balconies on which dirty clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy watersteps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and the whole place is enchanting. (IH, 16–17)

Implicit in the operations of James’s memory, driven by the ‘‘wild logic’’ of the impression, is a mild but nonetheless seriously meant rebuke to Ruskin, which he had summed up earlier in the essay: ‘‘Reading Ruskin is good; reading the old records is perhaps better; but the best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way to care for Venice as she deserves it is to give her a chance to touch you often—to linger and remain and return’’ (IH, 9–10). And yet, as both this preface and Italian Hours tell us, the story is not so simple, for at some level James’s Italy

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is inseparable from Ruskin’s Italy; to linger and remain in Venice is to stay on with the Oxford don. The reappearance of a ‘‘Ruskin-haunted’’ image does not merely signal a momentary return of a ‘‘Ruskinian contagion’’ that James had otherwise managed to repress; it alerts us to a necessary condition of this American’s Italian writings. notes

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This essay was originally published as ‘‘A Sense of Justice: Whistler, Ruskin, James, Impressionism,’’ Victorian Studies 42 (Summer 1999–2000): 593– 629. 1. Henry James, The American Scene, ed. John F. Sears (New York: Penguin, 1994), 228. 2. Time varied in many Italian cities by approximately four minutes per degree of longitude, hence the traveler’s reliance on the ‘‘Table of Italian Hours.’’ James reflects this source of temporal confusion for the foreign visitor in, for example, his ordering of the first five chapters, which were originally published separately in 1882, 1882, 1873, 1899, and 1902, respectively. 3. Connections between James and the Italian writings of Hawthorne and Howells are explored in detail by Bonney MacDonald, Henry James’s Italian Hours: Revelatory and Resistant Impressions (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1990), 9–35. Carl Maves offers the interesting, though barely substantiated, contention that the major influence on James’s version of Italy was Stendhal (Sensuous Pessimism: Italy in the Work of Henry James [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973], 6). Other important commentaries on James’s Italy, which place it in richly varied literary and cultural contexts, may be found in Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 157–209, and James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800 –1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 192–284. 4. Henry James, Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard (New York: Penguin, 1995), 55; abbreviated hereafter as IH and cited in the text with page numbers. 5. See also a letter that James wrote to his philosopher brother, William, on September 25, 1869, in which he described Tintoretto as an ‘‘immense perpetual moral presence’’; Letters of Henry James, vol. 1, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974–1984), 137– 38; abbreviated hereafter as L and cited in the text with volume and page numbers. 6. Henry James, The Painter’s Eye: Notes and Essays on the Pictorial Arts, ed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 160; abbreviated hereafter as PE and cited in the text with page numbers. Useful commentaries on the connections between James and Ruskin may be found in Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970), viii, 24; Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-

versity Press, 1990), 79–132; Susan M. Griffin, The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 93– 103. For further consideration of Ruskin’s importance for nineteenth-century American culture as a whole, as well as illuminating observations on James’s debts to Ruskin, see Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840 –1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967). 7. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2; Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 48. 8. In his critical writings James consistently upheld the value of irresponsibility. In 1864, for example, he praised Scott’s Waverley (1814) as ‘‘the novel irresponsible,’’ which ‘‘proposed simply to amuse the reader’’ and ‘‘undertook to prove nothing but facts.’’ In 1885 he used the same criteria to criticize George Eliot: ‘‘We feel in her, always, that she proceeds from the abstract to the concrete; that her figures and situations are evolved, as the phrase is, from her moral consciousness, and are only indirectly the products of observation. They are deeply studied and massively supported, but they are not seen, in the irresponsible plastic way’’ (Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Roger Gard [New York: Penguin, 1987], 21, 208). Thus the reviewer who complained that as an essayist James was ‘‘too freaky and irresponsible to be always a safe guide’’ was inadvertently paying him a compliment (Henry James: The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968], 71). 9. Vol. 29 of The Works of John Ruskin, Library Edition, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903–1912), 160; abbreviated hereafter as JRW and cited in the text with volume and page numbers. 10. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, xxvi, in Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page, rev. John Jump (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 230. 11. For an illuminating discussion of the conventions and expectations against which Whistler was working, see Shearer West, ‘‘Tom Taylor, William Powell Frith, and the British School of Art,’’ Victorian Studies 33, 2 (Winter 1990): 307–26. Both Taylor and Frith appeared as expert witnesses for the defense (that is, against Whistler) at the 1878 trial. For Holker’s courtroom commentary on Whistler’s art, see the transcript assembled from various newspaper reports by Linda Merrill in A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 166– 67. Other useful summaries may be found in Laurie Adams, Art on Trial: From Whistler to Rothko (New York: Walker, 1976), 1–34; H. Montgomery Hyde, Their Good Names: Twelve Cases of Libel and Slander, with Some Introductory Reflections on the Law (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), 67– 93; Stanley Weintraub, Whistler: A Biography (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1974), 188–229. See also Whistler’s self-servingly tailored version of events in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (New York: Dover, 1967), 1–19.

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12. In James’s early writings, Whistler rarely appears in a favorable light, as we may glean from a letter to Henry James, Sr., written during the hiatus between Ruskin’s 1877 attack on The Falling Rocket and the November 1878 trial: ‘‘He is a queer little Londonized Southerner and paints abominably’’ (L, 2 : 167). With time, however, James came to admire Whistler, as he indicated in a letter of 1897, in which he addressed his compatriot as a fellow member of the artistic elite: ‘‘To have pleased you, to have touched you, to have given you something of the impression of the decent little thing one attempted to do— this is for me, my dear Whistler, a rare and peculiar pleasure. For the arts are one, and with the artist the artist communicates. Therefore your good words come to me as from one who knows. You know, above all, better than anyone, how dreadfully few are such’’ (L, 4 : 43). James even used Whistler as the model for the successful sculptor and aesthete Gloriani in The Ambassadors (1901) (see Allen W. Menton, ‘‘Typical Tales of Paris: The Function of Reading in The Ambassadors,’’ Henry James Review 15, 3 [Fall 1994]: 291). 13. Tanner, Venice Desired, 169. Tanner adds that James ‘‘urbanely disengag[es] himself from the narrow-minded blight of the latter’’ of these two Ruskins, to which I would only add that James also tries to disengage the first Ruskin from the second. 14. Compare Ruskin’s comments in Mornings in Florence ( JRW, 23 : 312–14) with more favorable comments in Modern Painters I ( JRW, 3 : 202–3). 15. The church in question is St. Michele ( JRW, 9 : 429–30). 16. Osmond, Tintner concludes, ‘‘is an example of the total Paterization of a character.’’ What Tintner means by Paterization includes a response to W. H. Mallock’s caricature of Pater as Mr. Rose in his satirical work The New Republic (1877), with which James was quite familiar. See Adeline R. Tintner, ‘‘Pater in The Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl, Including Some Unpublished Henry James Letters,’’ Henry James Review 3, 2 (Winter 1987): 87–89. See also Freedman, Professions of Taste, 146– 66. 17. Carl Maves, Sensuous Pessimism, 7. 18. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Robert D. Bamberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 221, 297; abbreviated hereafter as PL and cited in the text with page numbers.

Brigitte Bailey

fuller, hawthorne, and imagining urban spaces in rome

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Nineteenth-century urban space emerged as a category conceptualized through a web of contradictory discourses and visual practices. It was at once a cosmopolitan space and a national space, at once owned by an explicitly male gaze and traversed and looked at by women. And it was immediately both covered and shaped by an expansive print culture already in place, a culture whose most widely disseminated forms, the newspaper and the novel, embodied and at times analyzed the contradictory perspectives that composed the urban imaginary. Ever since Benedict Anderson’s influential work on the cultural construction of nationhood, scholars have understood these two characteristic nineteenth-century genres as forms particularly appropriate for developing and disseminating a sense of national identity and for its successful internalization, that is, as helping to constitute a national imaginary; 1 similarly, a third popular bourgeois prose genre, travel writing, furthered the nationalist project by training what John Urry has called the ‘‘tourist gaze,’’ a ‘‘socially organized’’ gaze ‘‘constructed through difference,’’ on other nations.2 Examining Margaret Fuller’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Roman texts as overlapping genres, as conflations of tourist writing with journalism, on the one hand, and with fiction writing, on the other, reveals their engagement with what one might call a national city and their concerns, displaced onto the foreign scene of Italian urban space, about the mutually constituting elements of gender, city, and nation in the United States. Fuller’s dispatches to the New-York Tribune (1847–1849), during the period of the Roman Revolution, and Hawthorne’s romance The Marble Faun (1860), derived from his Italian sojourn during a period of political repression in Rome, serve divergent purposes, but they are also linked

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through the nationalist function of their genres—journalism and fiction—in constructing what Anderson has called the ‘‘imagined community’’ of the modern nation-state. The novel carries out the tourist’s agenda of the surveillance of foreign scenes in order to consolidate American national identity by contrast; as in most antebellum accounts, Italy in The Marble Faun is a posthistorical, aesthetic, feminized space whose transcendent status helps to solidify the identity of the United States as the province of language, masculine political agency, and contemporary history.3 Fuller’s newspaper account, on the other hand, focuses on present, political, and potentially nation-building action in Italy, on Italy’s possible emergence as a nation-state in its own right. But both accounts are also implicated in the related cultural effort of conceptualizing and representing the city, in developing an urban imaginary in antebellum American culture. The significance of Fuller’s and Hawthorne’s representations of Roman spaces as specifically urban spaces emerges in such descriptive moments as their contrasting treatments of the view from one of the traditional vantage points overlooking the city: from the Pincian Hill onto the Piazza del Popolo immediately below.4 Hawthorne gives us a panorama of Rome from the point of view of his American characters, Hilda and Kenyon: From the terrace where they now stood, there is an abrupt descent towards the Piazza del Popolo; and looking down into its broad space, they beheld the . . . palatial edifices . . . which grew . . . out of the thought of Michael Angelo. They saw, too, the red granite obelisk— eldest of things, even in Rome—which rises in the center of the piazza. . . . All Roman works . . . assume a transient . . . character, when we think that this indestructible monument supplied one of the recollections, which Moses, and the Israelites, bore from Egypt into the desert. . . . Lifting their eyes, Hilda and her companion gazed westward, and saw . . . the Castle of Sant’Angelo; that immense tomb of a pagan Emperor. . . . Still farther off, appeared a mighty pile of building, surmounted by the vast Dome [of St. Peter’s]. . . . [A]t this distance, the entire outline of the world’s Cathedral . . . is taken in at once.5

Their tourist gaze grasps the totality of the city and its major icons; their survey of the ‘‘varied prospect’’ (MF, 106) promises unlimited visual access to history (the Egyptian obelisk in the piazza prompts a cultural memory of Moses and the Israelites) and to architectural forms (‘‘at this distance, the entire outline’’ of St. Peter’s ‘‘is taken in at once’’). As

their gaze returns to the piazza below, they see the city’s central avatar in the novel, the painter Miriam, kneeling ambiguously in the presence of her Model, and the difficulty of interpreting Rome returns; is she, as Hilda thinks, kneeling merely to get water from the fountain, or is she, as Kenyon argues and as the reader already knows, begging her persecutor for her freedom? If Hawthorne emphasizes the promise and the limits of the tourist’s gaze, especially as it is a function of the gazer’s gender, Fuller, writing in December 1848 of revolutionary Rome, emphasizes the formation of contemporary history. She describes a gathering of troops, crowds, and government officials—all with republican sympathies—in the Piazza del Popolo and their movement to the Quirinal, the residence of the Pope, to demand political reforms: I passed along, toward the Piazza del Popolo. . . . I heard the drums beating, and, entering the Piazza, I found the troops of the line already assembled, and the Civic Guard marching by in platoons; each battaglione saluted as it entered by trumpets and a fine strain from the hand of the Carbineers. I climbed the Pincian to see better. There is no place so fine for anything of this kind as the Piazza del Popolo, it is so full of light, so fair and grand, the obelisk and fountain make so fine a center to all kinds of groups. The object of the present meeting was for the Civic Guard and troops of the line to give pledges of sympathy preparatory to going to the Quirinal to demand a change of Ministry and of measures. The flag of the Union was placed in front of the obelisk; all present saluted it; some officials made addresses; the trumpets sounded, and all moved toward the Quirinal.6

The promise of access this passage makes is not to a totalizing panorama of history, arranged in fixed icons (the Egyptian obelisk, the classical tomb, and the baroque church), but to a theater of open-ended history in the making, a ‘‘fine,’’ well-lit stage that serves as the backdrop to the ephemeral and fluid movements of flags, bodies, and trumpets. Simon During offers a model for thinking about the urban imaginary in his account of an eighteenth-century English ‘‘civil Imaginary,’’ a discursive formation that orders an emerging social world through the ‘‘production of narratives, moral cruxes, a linguistic decorum, and character types which cover the social field of the post-1688 world.’’ The texts, especially novels and journalists’ essays, produced by this eighteenth-century ‘‘civil Imaginary’’ ‘‘are a sympathetic attempt to cir-

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culate images of the forms of social existence available to the urban bourgeoisie of the time’’; they also attempt to order this world by shaping the subjectivity of those who inhabit it and so, as During points out, are ‘‘ethical in the Foucauldian sense.’’ 7 Antebellum American cities offered a similar ‘‘new cultural space.’’ Historians have documented the explosive rate of urbanization in the northeastern United States during this period.8 Accompanying this social change were discursive and visual strategies for seeing and ordering the city along middle- and upper-class lines. These strategies not only provided conceptual frameworks for seeing the city; they also normalized specific viewing positions, defined by gender and class, for the citizen of the city. And to the extent that they participated in the rhetoric of reform, they not only normalized but explicitly advocated ways of being in the city. Two approaches that define these positions and that I will draw on below are studies, derived from the work of Walter Benjamin, of the flaneur, the strolling male spectator of nineteenth-century city streets, and feminist histories of the place of women (physically and conceptually) in nineteenth-century cities.9 The writings of this period participated in a broadly articulated urban imaginary, a bourgeois, gendered discourse whose function it was both to describe and to produce the city. Fuller and Hawthorne participated in this discourse before they went abroad: Fuller through her writings covering New York social institutions during her two years there (1844–1846) and Hawthorne primarily through his Boston novel, The Blithedale Romance (1852). As a journalist, Fuller worked to render the city of New York visible to the reformminded middle-class readers of the Tribune; as Joan Von Mehren says, Fuller ‘‘publicize[d] conditions in the city’s charitable institutions’’: prisons, ‘‘almshouses, insane asylums, and homes for the blind and deaf.’’ 10 Catherine C. Mitchell points out that Horace Greeley’s Tribune advocated a reformist agenda that included temperance, the abolition of slavery, labor unions, and Fourier’s vision of socialism. Fuller edited and was the main contributor to the first-page ‘‘literary department,’’ a department that blended literary criticism, travel accounts, social analysis, and political correspondence.11 Fuller’s columns on New York produced for her readers over time an aggregate presence of cultural events (book publications, a concert at Castle Garden, an exhibition of an important painting), of the ongoing operations of disciplinary and benevolent institutions, and of architectural structures (such as Grace Church).12 Her attention to forms of urban life and space that existed outside the domestic sphere and yet simultaneously with it complicated the reader’s subjective experience of the city; her frequent contributions (three articles a week) covered and ordered the emerging ‘‘social field,’’ to use

During’s phrase, of the American city and sought to mold the consciousness of her audience.13 The Blithedale Romance is, on the other hand, Hawthorne’s sustained study, as Dana Brand puts it, of ‘‘an urban civilization on the point of becoming ubiquitous’’ and of ‘‘cosmopolitan modes of interacting with reality’’; the novel is split between representations of Boston and representations of what Hawthorne emphasizes is an urban fantasy: the ‘‘return’’ to a communal, pastoral, unalienated mode of production and cultural expression at ‘‘Blithedale,’’ modeled on the utopian agrarian community of Brook Farm, to which Hawthorne had briefly belonged.14 Linking these two spaces is Hawthorne’s narrator, Miles Coverdale, who appears as, according to Brand, the ‘‘representative subjectivity’’ of modernity—‘‘that of the flaneur,’’ the detached consumer of spectacle.15 Unlike Fuller’s persona of the reform writer, who seeks to intervene in the consciousness of her readers and to reorganize aspects of urban life, Hawthorne is interested in an urban subjectivity whose orientation to the city is primarily visual, a subjectivity that, as Griselda Pollock argues, is secured by gender and class hierarchies and located in middle- and upper-class male spectators: ‘‘The flaneur symbolizes the privilege or freedom to move about the public arenas of the city observing but never interacting, consuming the sights through a controlling but rarely acknowledged gaze.’’ 16 The flaneur’s impulse to type other urban characters—to know them through the eye—at once separates him from the crowd but also, in Benjamin’s words, is an unsuccessful fantasy that viewing others can ‘‘break through’’ the actual isolation of urban inhabitants ‘‘by filling the hollow space created in him by such isolation, with the borrowed—and fictitious—isolations of strangers.’’ 17 Hawthorne’s exploration of Coverdale’s modern position of visual privilege and social isolation is connected with his interest in the tourist’s visual consumption of foreign parts. During this period, Rome served both as posthistorical aesthetic spectacle and as an historical model for the idea of the U.S. national capital as either the political center of a republic or as imperial capital; it also served, more specifically, as a source of architectural models for the Capitol building in Washington.18 Fuller’s and Hawthorne’s writings on Rome emphasize two possibilities for conceiving of American urban space: as political space or as consumable spectacle. Although Fuller imagines a political city, a polis, and Hawthorne is primarily engaged by the tourist’s or flaneur’s vision of the city, both aspects of these sometimes mutually contradictory components of the antebellum urban imaginary are present in both texts. Both writers seem at times aware of and yet enact the dominating, totalizing view of foreign sites that

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William W. Stowe finds characterizes the guidebooks of the period: ‘‘Tourists are sightseers: their subjugating gaze reduces individuals, institutions, art-works, and landscapes to bits of knowledge and elevates the tourists and their class, race, gender, and nation to the position of the authoritative knower.’’ 19 As do philanthropic projects, tourism extends participation in a master gaze to women. Yet if Fuller wrestles with the contradictions between such a master gaze, this visual sampling of other regions, and her project of releasing Italy and Italians from static types to dynamic historical presences, Hawthorne writes, in effect, an analysis of what urban space looks like in which the political and historical have been repressed. In his study of American urban literature, Sidney Bremer traces a variety of written responses to the nineteenth-century growth of the city from ‘‘polis’’ to ‘‘metropolis’’ to ‘‘megalopolis.’’ He finds that the dominant conceptual model in the pre–Civil War period is still the older one of the polis, the ‘‘city-town.’’ In this period, in which ‘‘fairly homogeneous, powerful mercantile elites dominated the economy and society of U.S. cities’’ and in which most published writers were members of this elite, the ‘‘city-town model in literature’’ is characterized by a voluntary sense of community, by a ‘‘strong sense of history,’’ and by human agency; ‘‘the city-town’s spaces form an environment that is shaped by human choices more than it shapes them.’’ 20 Fuller draws on the city-town model to create an image of Rome as polis and as the emerging capital of the nation-state envisioned by the leaders of the Risorgimento. In doing so, she assumes the position of the elite republican writer, whose voice guides the formation of the community.21 Fuller traveled and lived in Europe in 1846–1850 as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune. During her travels in England, France, and Italy, Fuller met with a number of republican activists and exiles, including the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz and Giuseppe Mazzini, the leader of the revolutionary republican movement, Young Italy. She arrived in Rome in 1847, in time to witness and report on the attempt by northern Italian states to throw off Austrian rule, on revolutionary activity throughout Italy, and on the brief exile of Pope Pius IX from Rome and the equally brief existence of a Roman Republic in 1849. Like Mazzini and others, Fuller understood the Roman Republic as a movement toward a unified Italy. And she understood herself as its historian; she was working on a manuscript of the history of the Roman Republic when she died in 1850.22 Fuller’s letters to the Tribune repeatedly describe a city defined by citizens in motion, by political processions, funerals, troop movements, and religious festivals whose meaning is increasingly political. As Wil-

liam L. Vance says, ‘‘the People’’ become the hero of these letters.23 Suppressing her private doubts about ‘‘the People,’’ as Larry J. Reynolds points out,24 Fuller publicly constructs a city increasingly ‘‘shaped by human choices’’ in the revolutionary days of self-determination. And she constructs a citizenry that, despite the lack of republican institutions and training, is already composed of self-regulating subjects. Her depictions of processions along the central thoroughfare of Rome, the Corso, deemphasize the architectural structure of the street (that is, external forms of order) and emphasize instead a naturalized image of voluntary community in motion. In May 1847, during a period when Pius IX briefly allied himself with the proponents of liberal reform, Fuller sent this description of voluntary political association and benevolent patriarchal support of such association to the Tribune: A week or two ago the Cardinal Secretary published a circular inviting the departments to measures which would give the people a sort of representative council. Nothing could seem more limited than this improvement but it was a great measure for Rome. At night the Corso . . . was illuminated, and many thousands passed through it in a torch-bearing procession. . . . [A]s a river of fire, they streamed slowly through the Corso, on their way to the Quirinal to thank the Pope, upbearing a banner on which the edict was printed. . . . Ascending the Quirinal they made it a mount of light. . . . The Pope appeared on his balcony: the crowd shouted three vivas; he extended his arms: the crowd fell on their knees and received his benediction; he retired, and the torches were extinguished, and the multitude dispersed in an instant. (DFE, 136–37)

Here, Fuller offers a way of conceptualizing the transition from paternal, Papal authority (signaled by the crowd’s kneeling for the benediction) to the internalized law of the self-disciplining subject of the republican state; 25 the ‘‘multitude’’ shapes itself into a political community and then disperses by its own will, a motif Fuller constantly reiterates in her crowd descriptions. Such scenes draw on the concept of the polis, on the premetropolitan city-town shaped by the voluntary association of its inhabitants, to visualize the emergence of the agency of Rome’s citizens. Fuller is aware of the ethical thrust of the urban imaginary she is engaged in and helping to shape. She sees that the public sphere is discursively constructed; her reports repeatedly describe and often include translations of proclamations, accounts in the emerging liberal press of Italy, and the ‘‘news’’ orally transmitted from other regions of revolu-

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tionary Italy. The polis is invoked by language. The ‘‘circular’’ granting a limited representative body calls forth the procession, whose discursive origin is clear; the crowd carries the text of the edict printed on a banner. And citizens are also called into being through language; Fuller says that the first election in Rome (in early 1849 of the Constitutional Assembly for the Roman States) was a successful exercise of suffrage because of discussions held in the public sphere: ‘‘A few weeks’ schooling at some popular meetings, the clubs, the conversations of the National Guards . . . was sufficient’’ (DFE, 255). In Paris As Revolution, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson comments on Balzac’s and Hugo’s concept of the postrevolutionary writer’s role in creating an urban imaginary. It is the task of the urban novelist to replace the gaze of the king, which had earlier given Paris unity, with that of the writer. The ‘‘urban imagination,’’ she argues, is a ‘‘synecdochal imagination’’ that sees the apparent ‘‘fragments’’ of the city as parts of a whole: ‘‘Synecdoche thus bespeaks the aesthetic of integration. . . . Integration . . . create[s] [a] unity that . . . does not exist. . . . [T]his creation is the vocation of the writer.’’ 26 In this respect like Balzac and Hugo, but also like the political leader of the Roman Republic, Mazzini, whose speeches and writings she includes in her dispatches, Fuller tries to call forth Rome as polis, as modern republican capital, through language. The processions she describes become synecdoches, parts standing in for the whole, an available image of the voluntary community she wants Rome to become and that she wants the American nation to reapproximate. Fuller attempts to revive American republicanism by means of an identification between her readers and Italian revolutionaries: ‘‘This cause is OURS’’ (DFE, 160). Both American aid to the Italians and the American national revival from the sins of slavery and the Mexican War will happen through the agency of ‘‘individuals’’ and small groups, who stand in for the whole of the country and who represent the ‘‘Soul of our Nation’’ (DFE, 161); ‘‘voluntary association for improvement . . . will be the grand means for my country to grow’’ (DFE, 165). In such passages Fuller tries to call not only the modern Italian nation but also an American national subjectivity into being, a subjectivity characteristic of the polis. In doing so, she tries to connect, I would argue, the traditional, elite idea of the polis with the more revolutionary and egalitarian associationism of Fourier and his American exponents, a connection that elides the differences between older American republicanism and current European radicalism.27 Of course Fuller’s Rome is also a spectacle, a theater of revolution that elicits aesthetic responses. Of the above torchlight procession, she describes the visual effect and notes, ‘‘I have never seen anything finer’’

(DFE, 137). And as she overlooks the gathering in the Piazza del Popolo, she describes this urban space as one especially fit for civic performances; to reiterate one sentence, ‘‘There is no place so fine for anything of this kind as the Piazza del Popolo, it is so full of light, so fair and grand, the obelisk and fountain make so fine a center to all kinds of groups’’ (DFE, 241). Such passages suggest that, like urban novels and urban journalism, public performances of republican solidarity can invent the modern national capital. The unified city and its citizens can be performed into being. But these passages also invoke the language of tourism and perhaps of more ‘‘modern,’’ metropolitan forms of visual consumption. Indeed, Fuller’s text vacillates between two modes of presenting revolution to her Tribune readers: the spectacular, romantic movements of the body of the citizenry in such passages as the one on the torchlight procession and deliberately sober, antispectacular accounts of the ‘‘tranquil[ity]’’ (DFE, 260) and ordinariness of life in revolutionary Rome. During the siege of Rome she comments on the ‘‘order of Rome’’: ‘‘I go from one end to the other . . . alone and on foot. My friends send out their little children alone with their nurses’’ (DFE, 284). Fuller’s ambivalence about using a language of visual display to describe revolutionary activity may stem from her awareness that tourism operates in part by pictorializing characteristic events and people into types and therefore ultimately depriving them of agency— exactly the opposite of what she is trying to do. As she says of British tourists, the ‘‘vulgarity’’ that ‘‘snatches ‘bits’ for a ‘sketch’ ’’ makes them ‘‘the most unseeing of all possible animals’’ (DFE, 132), a statement that associates the tourist gaze with reactionary politics.28 Hawthorne’s Rome in The Marble Faun, as readers have pointed out, is primarily a series of tourist spaces: galleries, artists’ studios, villa gardens, classical ruins, churches, catacombs.29 As opposed to Fuller or Hugo, Hawthorne does not conceive of his writing as reinventing the city, and he visits Rome in 1859–1860 at a time of political repression, after the failure of the 1849 Roman Republic and before the final unification of Italy. The book itself represents for many readers divided impulses; Richard H. Brodhead finds that the novel, despite its considerable ambivalence about the process of creation, winds up supporting the stratification of art into high and low and, in giving Hilda the last word, effectively supports the authoritative repressions associated with ‘‘high’’ art and with ‘‘subordination-demanding institutions.’’ 30 Robert Levine, who gives the novel perhaps its fullest recent reading as a text concerned with political issues and specifically with revolutionary activity, finds that despite Hawthorne’s ‘‘partial sympathy’’ with Miriam’s rebellion against ‘‘various reactionary forces depicted in the novel,’’ he ac-

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quiesces with the recontainment of such rebellion at its end.31 My argument is a similar one: that Hawthorne’s urban imaginary is predicated on a gendered position, that The Marble Faun at once acknowledges and recontains the bid of women spectators for public participation in cities and in the informing gaze onto cities, and that Hawthorne reflects the effort by his contemporary male journalists and flaneurs to order the emerging metropolitan city through a gendered geography. Rome becomes a space where both revolution and women’s gazes are evoked and repressed, indeed where urbanity comes to imply their simultaneous presence and nullification. Mary P. Ryan identifies 1840 as ‘‘a rough benchmark in the gender geography of public urban space.’’ At about this time, the separation of work from household space became increasingly standard for middleclass families and, as opposed to a greater ‘‘public mingling’’ that characterized earlier American urban life, public and private spheres became more fully separated and gendered. So just at the time that American cities grew into unzoned, apparently chaotic metropolises, gender became especially available as a category to decipher the city. As Ryan says, a mid-century ‘‘army of flaneurs cum journalists . . . impose[d] cognitive patterns on the heterogeneous spaces of the city’’ through a ‘‘cartography of gender’’: Relations with women, clearly the ‘‘other’’ in this largely male construction of urban geography, provided male writers with metaphors that neatly encapsulated the central problem of urban social space: how to create order and hierarchy in an environment where social differences existed in close physical proximity. Sexuality was perhaps the most powerful metaphor for the interplay of diversity and proximity in the big city. 32

In this version of the urban imaginary, ‘‘dangerous’’ and ‘‘endangered’’ women became urban signs of class and ethnic difference. As T. Walter Herbert persuasively argues, Hawthorne’s visit to Rome coincided with a crisis in his faith in the coherence of the ideological and psychological structure of the middle-class family, and the romance is in part an attempt to recontain this crisis about authority and gender.33 The novel features two women who move freely about the streets of Rome—Hilda and Miriam— one endangered and one dangerous. Hawthorne both lauds this freedom of movement and worries about it; by the end of the novel Hilda’s ability to move freely has been undermined by her witnessing the crime of murder and her subsequent captivity experience.34 The novel wants virtuous middle-class

women to wander freely in urban spaces, but the city’s capacity to taint this virtue seems too strong and Hilda is best relegated to safe spaces for such women: the home. Miriam also wanders but always less freely; as an expression of the city—with her mixed ethnic and national heritage, her antipatriarchal revolutionary impulses, as Levine points out, her masked identity, and her sexually ambiguous past—she is at once a victim of the city and linked to its subterranean power structures, even connected with someone in the Papal government, as the narrator states in the postscript (MF, 464).35 The novel functions to separate these two women, to keep apart the possibilities for being in the city that they each represent. Leonardo Buonomo argues that Hawthorne meticulously keeps Hilda and Donatello separate as signs of two irreconcilable cultures; 36 it is also part of the cultural work of the novel to divide Hilda and Miriam, whom Hawthorne at first portrays as intimate. At the end Miriam is represented as being on the other side of an ‘‘abyss’’ (MF, 461) from Hilda, separated by categories of experience Hilda does not wish to acknowledge. Indeed, Hawthorne uses Hilda as an agent of repression for Miriam—Hilda’s information leads to Miriam’s loss of Donatello through his arrest and incarceration—and so cuts middleclass women off from their ethnic and experiential others. By doing so he represses the fact that middle-class women such as Fuller and Lydia Maria Child, who was briefly a journalist in New York in the 1840s, have already wandered through this emerging new metropolitan space and have assumed in their writings the gazing position generally held by men.37 Kenyon’s and Hilda’s contemplation of Miriam as part of their survey of Rome from the Pincian Hill anticipates the conclusion of the novel in its movement away from the mutual look of intimate relations that characterizes their relationship with Miriam in the beginning of the romance toward a reestablishment of the dominant and hierarchical tourist gaze. It is like Fuller’s scene from the same spot in that both passages are turning points in their respective accounts; Miriam’s despairing supplication to the Model, the mysterious agent of her oppression, immediately anticipates his murder (and her supplicating kneeling to Donatello, who kills the Model and liberates her), while the movement of the republican procession to the Quirinal precipitates Pope Pius IX’s flight from Rome and the beginning of the Roman Republic, a liberty as short-lived as Miriam’s and Donatello’s. But here we have two interpretive gazers; whereas Hilda underinterprets the scene, Kenyon turns out to be a good reader of emblematic urban moments. His superior insight, even as it is presented as risky and in need of Hilda’s domesticating discipline, permits him to continue to interact with Miriam, even

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to give her advice, that is, to shape the plot of her life. As Hilda breaks off her relationship with Miriam, Kenyon becomes the go-between, the mobile spectator and interpreter who can move between the two spheres they represent. In this scene Miriam—and other possibilities for women’s cognitive grasp of the city—is returned to her status as a sign of the city; the possible woman gazer, as Fuller herself was for Hawthorne, moves from being a subject to being again an object of the gaze. The city in The Marble Faun is the site of revolution repressed; Donatello, the pastoral, infantilized male Italian of much tourist writing, becomes in the city the violent revolutionary who destroys the Model, the figure of past modes of oppression, while Miriam’s gaze, which triggers the murder, overthrows patriarchal authority. But these possible historical agents—the Italian man and the urban woman—become pictorialized, part of the gallery of masked figures and allegorical images Italy offers to tourists, by the end of the novel, as they disappear into the Roman carnival and, as Donatello does, into prison. In a reversal of Fuller’s project, the early identification between the American characters and these figures is weakened and made abstract, even perhaps psychologized, as the paradigm of the tourist’s vision returns. In an association Fuller might have understood, Hawthorne connects his most thorough tourist’s survey of Rome in the novel, in which he calls Rome ‘‘the City of all time, and of all the world!’’ (MF, 111), with Kenyon’s vision of Miriam kneeling in the Piazza del Popolo, metaphorically ‘‘shackled’’ like the ‘‘captive queen’’ Zenobia (MF, 108), that is, determined by her urban environment rather than shaping it through her gaze. In the dreamwork of national building that tourist writings represent,38 the tourist gaze is at once provisionally liberatory and disciplinary, releasing such figures as Miriam and Donatello and reincarcerating them. Similarly, the figure of Miriam/Zenobia speaks to the ‘‘dreamwork’’ of imagining the national, even imperial city. Hawthorne draws here on his viewing of the American sculptor Harriet Hosmer’s statue of Zenobia, which he admired while in Rome and mentions in his preface to The Marble Faun (MF, 4).39 As Joy S. Kasson explains, Hosmer’s statue, in its representation of a Syrian queen defeated by a Roman emperor and paraded through Rome in chains, evoked simultaneously the images of female power and captivity.40 And it did so explicitly, I would add, in the context of Rome, cast here as imperial metropolis. If the ambivalently rendered image of the shackled woman of power lies at the center of the spectacular metropolis for Hawthorne, just as similarly ambivalent images of women, according to Ryan, define the

‘‘gender geography’’ of the mid-century city for other male writers, Fuller, like Hosmer, at times participates in this trope and seeks to revise it. Larry J. Reynolds has argued that Fuller constructs a ‘‘public persona’’ in her dispatches, that she performs the ‘‘role of Liberty,’’ the feminine embodiment of the spirit of revolution, an image available in European romantic culture.41 If ‘‘Liberty’’ is defeated in the Roman Revolution, nevertheless, Fuller’s adherence to this persona is an attempt to make a feminine sign speak, to merge image and discourse, representation and agency, and to do so in the context of political transformation played out in a national city. As American cities moved toward a metropolitan identity at midcentury, the task of constructing an urban imaginary became urgent. Both texts show the tensions within such a cultural project. If Hawthorne’s engagement with the gendered gaze of the urban spectator is more attuned to the emerging visual strategies of the metropolis, and so more ‘‘modern,’’ Fuller’s attempt to revive the concepts of city and citizenship defined by the republican polis is more ‘‘progressive.’’ Their works may indicate less any clear historical shift from polis to the city of spectacle than a dialectical relation between these models of urbanity that continues to shape nineteenth-century American urban representations.

notes 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). For a characteristic treatment of the relations between literary forms and the nation, see Timothy Brennan, who argues that novels were a ‘‘practical means of creating a people’’ in ‘‘The National Longing for Form,’’ in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 50. For an important distinction between an earlier role of print culture in elaborating a public sphere and the function of the novel, see Michael Warner, who argues that ‘‘although the nation-state was the product of the eighteenth century, the national imaginary was a product of the nineteenth’’ in Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 120. 2. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 1– 4. 3. Brigitte Bailey, ‘‘The Protected Witness: Cole, Cooper, and the Tourist’s View of the Italian Landscape,’’ American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 92– 94.

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4. Eleanor L. Jones points out that the Pincian Hill was a ‘‘popular’’ site with ‘‘artists, photographers, and other travelers’’ in both the antebellum and post–Civil War periods (‘‘Sanford Robinson Gifford,’’ in The Lure of Italy: American Artists and the Italian Experience 1760 –1914, ed. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. [Boston and New York: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992], 230). 5. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, introduction by Richard H. Brodhead (New York: Penguin, 1990), 106–7. Subsequent citations will appear in the text abbreviated MF. 6. Margaret Fuller, ‘‘These Sad But Glorious Days’’: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850, ed. Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 241. Subsequent citations will appear in the text abbreviated DFE. 7. Simon During, ‘‘Literature—Nationalism’s Other? The Case for Revision,’’ in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 142– 43. 8. See, for example, James L. Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 121–22. 9. Benjamin’s articulation of Baudelaire’s figure of the flaneur as the characteristic figure of modernity has informed both art historical accounts and literary criticism of the period (Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn [London: New Left Books, 1973]). In this essay I draw on Griselda Pollock’s discussion of gender and the gaze in nineteenth-century French painting, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), and Dana Brand’s reading of antebellum American male writers as flaneurs, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The historical studies that have informed my thinking here are Mary P. Ryan’s investigation of women and public space in three nineteenth-century American cities, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), and Christine Stansell’s examination of women’s lives and roles in antebellum New York, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 10. Joan Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 218. 11. Catherine C. Mitchell, Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism: A Biographical Essay and Key Writings (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 16–17. 12. I have taken these examples from Mitchell’s edition of Fuller’s New York journalism. See also Bell Gale Chevigny for more of Fuller’s Tribune pieces: The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings, rev. ed. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994). Just published, however, is the most authoritative and complete edition of Fuller’s journalism while she lived

in New York: Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844– 1846, ed. Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 13. Mitchell points out that in the mid-1840s, the early days of its existence, the Tribune was still a relatively small newspaper that competed with two other papers for predominance in New York and not the nationally influential paper it would quickly become in the 1850s (Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism, 10, 13). 14. Brand, The Spectator and the City, 123. William E. Cain, in his recent edition of The Blithedale Romance (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), has incorporated an illuminating set of documents from the period on social reform, utopian communal experiments, and related issues. 15. Brand, The Spectator and the City, 124–27. My thinking about The Blithedale Romance as an urban text has benefited not only from Brand’s work but also from Nancy Von Rosk’s thoughtful dissertation, ‘‘Domestic Visions and Shifting Identities: The Urban Novel and the Rise of a Consumer Culture in America, 1852–1925’’ (University of New Hampshire, 1999). 16. Pollock, Vision and Difference, 67. 17. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, 58. 18. Sidney H. Bremer, Urban Intersections: Meetings of Life and Literature in United States Cities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 30. 19. William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 48. 20. Bremer, Urban Intersections, 13. 21. In this way Fuller follows her father’s example; as her biographers point out, Timothy Fuller was a self-made member of the New England elite, a Jeffersonian Republican twice elected to the U.S. Congress from Massachusetts who did not survive politically the transition to Jacksonian democracy. See Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse, 13; and Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10 –13. 22. A number of biographers and literary critics have discussed these final years in her life, as well as the (lost) manuscript. I cite here only the most recent biographer, Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse, 230 –339. 23. William L. Vance, America’s Rome, vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), 132–35. 24. Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), 76. 25. One of the most recent treatments of the constitution of this subjectivity is Dana D. Nelson’s study of early national manhood: National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 26. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris As Revolution: Writing the NineteenthCentury City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 68– 69. 27. See Von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse, 224, for a discussion of Fuller’s

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Fourierist friends in New York, just before her trip to Europe. For a discussion of Fourier’s influence on Fuller’s feminism, see Christina Zwarg, Feminist Conversations: Fuller, Emerson, and the Play of Reading (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 28. Fuller in general sees British interests as reactionary; of the London Times she says, ‘‘There exists not in Europe a paper more violently opposed to the cause of freedom’’ (DFE, 294). 29. See Richard H. Brodhead’s introduction to The Marble Faun, xvii–xviii. 30. Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 73–75. 31. Robert S. Levine, ‘‘ ‘Antebellum Rome’ in The Marble Faun,’’ American Literary History 2 (Spring 1990): 31, 25. 32. Ryan, Women in Public, 61– 68, 75. 33. T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 215–72. 34. Jenny Franchot discusses Hilda’s disappearance in terms of the conventions of the American Protestant ‘‘convent captivity narrative’’ in Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 357. 35. Such characters are also staples of the ‘‘mysteries of the city’’ fiction by authors, such as George Lippard, who focused their novels on New York and Philadelphia in the 1840s and 1850s. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 82–84. 36. Leonardo Buonomo, Backward Glances: Exploring Italy, Reinterpreting America (1831–1866) (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 52–53. 37. See Ryan, Women in Public, for a brief discussion of Child’s urban explorations and her Letters from New York (82–83). 38. I draw here on W. J. T. Mitchell’s discussion of landscape representations as the ‘‘ ‘dreamwork’ of imperialism,’’ in ‘‘Imperial Landscape,’’ in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 10. 39. Rita K. Gollin and John L. Idol, Jr., describe Hawthorne’s response to Hosmer’s statue in Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Uses of the Visual Arts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), 96. 40. Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 151. 41. Reynolds, European Revolutions, 74–76.

Susan M. Griffin

the black robe of romance hawthorne’s shadow and howells’s italian priest

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In 1865, William Dean Howells attacked ‘‘the Old-World error’’ of priestly celibacy in an article for the New York Times on ‘‘Marriage among the Italian Priesthood.’’ 1 Nine years later, his novel A Foregone Conclusion criticized the Italian Catholic Church.2 I argue that these texts show how ‘‘Romanism’’ plays a role in Howells’s early literary self-definition. Borrowing standard plots, images, and characters from Gothic and antiCatholic literature, Howells explores questions of genre and gender. Mediating between A Foregone Conclusion on the one hand and Gothic and polemic writing on the other is Howells’s forebear, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne’s shadow falls across A Foregone Conclusion’s story of an American artist serving as a diplomat in Europe (like Hawthorne and Howells). In the Italy of A Foregone Conclusion Henry Ferris is repeatedly confronted with Hawthornian romance as a subject and a structure for both his artistic creation and his self-making. Howells represents romantic knowledge as embodied in the character of Don Ippilito, the Italian priest. Ferris deeply desires, yet painfully refuses, these romantic representations of self and other. Although he does not see Hawthorne’s example at work in A Foregone Conclusion, Richard Brodhead aptly characterizes the dynamics of influence between the two writers: ‘‘Part of Howells’s understanding of realism comes from his facing of what Hawthorne represented, both as a model and a challenge to his work.’’ 3 By depicting Ferris’s dilemma, Howells’s own ‘‘modern’’ art attempts, I demonstrate, to include yet ironize romance. If the Italian priest Don Ippilito allows Howells as an American artist to construct an ironized romance, he is also the vehicle for the novelist’s anxious exploration of American maleness. Jenny Franchot has documented how anti-Catholicism functioned as ‘‘an imaginative category

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of discourse’’ through which antebellum culture was able to explore the tensions and anxieties of American masculinity.4 A Foregone Conclusion gives an example of the cultural work that Protestant depictions of Catholicism perform after the Civil War. Howells reworks the tried and true man-woman-priest triangle of anti-Catholic polemic into a ‘‘modern instance’’ of sexual dysfunction. And the familiar Gothic figure of the ‘‘black-robed’’ priest is rendered as a failed version of those two representative images of American maleness, the inventor and the soldier. A doomed Don Ippilito limns the stigma of male failure in America—a stigma that Howells, although newly established as the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, still feared in the early 1870s. Edwin Cady points out that Howells designated A Foregone Conclusion ‘‘[m]y first novel,’’ despite having published previous books of fiction.5 Howells is, Cady argues, declaring his choice of genre: He has progressed as a writer from the romance to the novel. Michael Davitt Bell, Alfred Habegger, and others have descried an anxiety about gender in Howells’s choice of realism as his writerly mode at this point in his career, a means of distancing himself from what he perceived as the feminized genre of romance.6 Yet, in making that choice, Howells does not simply reject or even critique Hawthornian romance and all that it represents. Rather, he delineates the functional role that these earlier American models for art play in the making of the modern man of letters. Habegger, tracing what he sees as Howells’s successful growth to adult masculinity through writing realism, recognizes the role that Don Ippilito plays as the ‘‘unmanly man’’ whom Ferris fears he is. ‘‘He [Don Ippilito] is a realist’s version of Hawthorne’s artist of the beautiful,’’ Habegger states, making the connection to Hawthorne.7 Indeed, Habegger argues that Don Ippilito is Howells’s critique of the feminized male of the age. But Howells is not simply critiquing romance and ‘‘femininity’’ here. Rather, romance is necessary to Howells’s realism, and the figure of the ‘‘unmanly man’’ is less a simple historical reality, as Habegger assumes, and more an historical image of anxiety. A Foregone Conclusion clearly demonstrates how much of Don Ippilito is Howells’s protagonist’s own projective creation. Finally, I would stress that Don Ippilito is not an indeterminate ‘‘clergyman’’ but specifically an Italian priest, the representative of what Jackson Lears has called the religion of ‘‘antimodernism.’’ 8 As such, he is a figure of and for the past, at once religious, cultural, generational, literary, and, I suggest, psychological. In 1874 an Italian priest represents the past for a range of reasons. In the contemporary Italian politics, the Roman Catholic Church represented a conservative force, the enemy of Italian republicanism. This

stance is explicit within A Foregone Conclusion, where Don Ippilito is suspected of being a spy for the Austrian government (FC, 59). As a good American republican, Ferris ‘‘has the prejudice of all Italian sympathizers against the priests’’ ( FC, 4), a prejudice he shares with Howells himself, whose sympathies are evident throughout his extensive writings on Italy during this period.9 A Roman Catholic priest also represents the theological past. According to Protestant teleology, the nineteenth-century Catholic Church stands, at best, for a stubborn unregeneracy, a refusal to progress into the pure inner light of Protestantism. At its worst, Roman Catholicism is a decaying, corrupt organization that preserves and repeats the sins of the Renaissance and the Inquisition—the Scarlet Lady, the Whore of Babylon.10 This aura of ancient evil surrounds the black-robed priest of the Gothic, a literary mode that appears, by the 1870s, comically primitive to writers and critics such as Howells.11 Yet, thanks in part to the virulent antiCatholicism resurgent in the decades after the Civil War,12 the evil priest is not merely a comic figure in the American cultural imagination of the time, but a potent, if archaic, threat. Of course, Howells is clearly not writing anti-Catholic polemic, either in the New York Times or in A Foregone Conclusion (or anywhere else for that matter). Indeed, his Swedenborgian upbringing had been one of religious tolerance. Nonetheless, Howells, like most American republicans of the time, regards the Roman Catholic Church as the enemy of modern Italy and explicitly describes the Italian priesthood as sexually corrupt. But Howells’s primary interest in anti-Catholicism is the literary use he can make of it: Assuming his audience’s familiarity with these traditional characters and plots, Howells can at once invoke and ironize the black robe’s story in his own modern novel. A Foregone Conclusion tells the story of Henry Ferris’s hesitant and ambivalent relations with Florida Vervain, an American girl living with her mother in Venice. Ferris is wary of Florida’s ‘‘passionate’’ temperament and holds her at a distance. Throughout much of the novel, Ferris observes and tests the young woman, seeking to determine her true nature and worth. The third party in this modern romance is Don Ippilito, an Italian priest who eventually falls in love with Florida, to both her and Ferris’s dismay. In a climactic but ironic ‘‘recognition’’ scene, Ferris watches Florida’s embrace of the priest, interpreting what is actually an affectionate act of compassion as proof of illicit passion and deception. Don Ippilito dies soon afterward; Ferris returns to the States and fights and is wounded in the Civil War. The novel ends with Ferris and Florida’s reconciliation and marriage. A Foregone Conclusion was published first in the Atlantic Monthly ( July–

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December 1874) and then in book form in 1875. It was reviewed twice by Henry James in January 1875, once in the North American Review and once in the Nation.13 During the 1870s, Howells and James inhabited a common ‘‘culture of letters,’’ to use Richard Brodhead’s term. Reading and reviewing one another, the two writers sought to find and shape their own audiences of readers, as the tutelary tone of their reviews and letters makes clear. Negotiating the boundaries of realism and romance, they represent themselves as a new generation of American writers. Not surprisingly, then, James’s reaction to A Foregone Conclusion is richly suggestive regarding the contemporary cultural issues at stake in this antebellum novel about American art. James finds Howells’s anti-Romish novel successful precisely insofar as its portrait of the Church and its power is psychologically convincing. Discussing the writing of A Foregone Conclusion in a letter to James, Howells explained ‘‘the hero is a Venetian priest in love with an American girl.’’14 Following Howells’s lead, James consistently refers to the book in correspondence as a novel about a ‘‘Venetian priest.’’ And both of James’s reviews focus on the character of that priest, Don Ippilito, rather than on the American ambassador Ferris, despite the fact that the latter is Howells’s self-portrait and the obvious predecessor of Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors. James claims that ‘‘the story is Don Ippilito’s. . . . It is the poor priest’s property, as it were; we regret even the reversion of it to Mr. Ferris. We confess even to a regret at seeing it survive Don Ippilito at all.’’ 15 James was not alone among American readers in focusing on A Foregone Conclusion’s Italian priest. Even those who disagreed with Howells’s assessment of the Catholic clergy took Don Ippilito seriously: James Woodress reports that John Boyle O’Reilly, editor of the Catholic Boston Pilot, protested the depiction of the priesthood in the novel.16 On the other hand, Longfellow, Francis Child (professor of English at Harvard and Howells’s Cambridge neighbor), John Hay, and Robert Dale Owen joined James in praising the characterization of Don Ippilito.17 James’s detailed evocation of the figure of the priest suggests why this audience of postbellum American male intellectuals found Don Ippilito so compelling: a real creation,—a most vivid, complete, and appealing one. . . . The poor caged youth, straining to the end of his chain, pacing round his narrow circle, gazing at the unattainable outer world, bruising himself in the effort to reach it, and falling back to hide himself and die unpitied,—is a figure which haunts the imagination and claims a permanent place in one’s melancholy memories.18

Habegger argues that this version of Don Ippilito is not at all Howells’s but wholly James’s—indeed wholly James.19 Habegger sees this pathetic characterization as a figure for James’s own inadequate masculinity and Americanness, which in turn account for the failure of James’s realism. While rejecting Habegger’s characterization of James, I would second his connection of both Howells’s text and James’s reading of it to matters of gender, nationality, and genre. Indeed, James makes genre a matter of nationality. American readers, he claims, will come to A Foregone Conclusion already trained by Howells’s travel writings. James is thinking here of Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867), as well as Howells’s letters to the Boston Advertiser and articles in the Atlantic, the Nation, the New York Times, the North American Review, and elsewhere. The readerly expectations Howells fostered with these Italian writings created both advantages and disadvantages for him as a writer. James describes his friend as introducing us again to that charming half-merry, half-melancholy Venice which most Americans know better through his pages than through any others. He did this, in a measure, we think, at his risk; partly because there was a chance of disturbing an impression which, in so far as he was the author of it, had had time to grow very tranquil and mellow; and partly because there has come to be a not unfounded mistrust of the Italian element in light literature. Italy has been made to supply so much of the easy picturesqueness, the crude local color of poetry and the drama, that a use of this expedient is vaguely regarded as a sort of unlawful short-cut to success.20

Positioning both Howells and himself as modern, James claims that the growing refinement of the romancer’s art makes the use of ‘‘Italy’’ now seem suspect, out of date—it smacks of ‘‘Mrs. Radcliffe.’’ Analogizing reading to playing chess, James comments that for an author to pull this ‘‘Italian move’’ is enough to make the reader fold up the board and go home. What James’s analogy implies is the negotiations involved in writing and reading texts. Playing according to the agreed upon rules, with regulation board and pieces, the author relies on a repertoire of known conventions, as well as unexpected, original moves. Howells’s task is to take advantage of all that Italy offers without reproducing the same tired combinations, without resting even on the moves that he himself has originated in the past. Howells runs the risk of cliche´ by setting his story in Venice. But doing so is worth the gamble, James argues, because Venice supplies the romance that lifts A Foregone Conclusion above the quotidian.

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The American artist’s struggle to avoid, on the one hand, a cliche´d, unbelievable fantasy and, on the other, a sordid, heavy realism is depicted not just in James’s review but also within Howells’s novel itself. In A Foregone Conclusion, Howells raises problems of representation and genre, as well as the question of Catholicism’s place in modern (Protestant) art by foregrounding the problem of depicting the Italian priest. Don Ippilito’s apartment is explicitly a representation of the priest himself (‘‘the whole place was an outgrowth of himself, it was his history as well as his character’’ [ FC, 32]), and with his discussion of that homology Howells details the uses that ‘‘an Italian priest’’ will serve in his narrative. Don Ippilito has painted his anteroom to look like a grape arbor, yet his painting replicates not country vines but Venetian arbors created as entrances to restaurants or as decorations for palace doors. Similarly, the paintings in the priest’s parlor are copies of prints of masterpieces, ‘‘hard . . . in line, fixed in expression, and opaque in color’’ ( FC, 32). We can read the priest’s rooms as an indictment of Catholicism, a religion that, according to Protestant polemic, forces its clergy into celibacy; condemns them to an artificial imitation of life, experiencing nature at second hand; and stunts their imaginations, confining them to a crude idolatrous literalism, a reading for which Howells’s earlier attack on priestly celibacy in the New York Times gives warrant. However, Howells’s image of the priest’s decorations is directed not just at religion but also at the representation of religion. If the apartment means ‘‘priest,’’ ‘‘priest,’’ then, stands for the bad art that Howells will strive to avoid: an archaic notion of representation, wholly conventionalized, its rigid fidelity to a fixed ‘‘truth’’ ironically dictating an endless reproduction of cliche´s. Yet in describing the workshop, Howells seems to deliberately draw on a different set of cliche´s, invoking the Gothic demonized figure of the black-robed priest leagued with the dark side in the pursuit of secret knowledge: It seemed from some peculiarities of shape to have once been an oratory, but it was now begrimed with smoke and dust from the forge which Don Ippilito had set up in it; the embers of a recent fire, the bellows, the pincers, the hammers and the other implements of the trade gave it a sinister effect as if the place had been invaded by mocking imps, or as if some hapless mortal in contract with the evil powers were here searching by the help of the adversary, for the forbidden secrets of the metals and of fire. (FC, 33)

Reading about an oratory transformed into an inventor’s workshop in 1874, Howells’s Victorian readership might expect to see this magic modernized into science. But the inventor is a Roman Catholic priest, an anachronism for ‘‘modern’’ Protestant Americans, a conjurer who spirits the place of religion and prayer back in time into an alchemist’s laboratory. Like Victor Frankenstein, isolated from the community of modern thought, Don Ippilito is trapped in a dead end. Don Ippilito is a figure from the past not only because of his religious faith and ties to the Gothic. The Roman Catholic priest also allows Howells access to his predecessor Hawthorne, himself a writer who recognizes how ‘‘a by-gone time’’ conveys romance.21 The most direct literary precedents for Don Ippilito’s workshop are found in stories such as ‘‘The Birthmark’’ and ‘‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’’ Hawthorne’s shadow has appeared earlier in the novel when Howells’s narrative voice refers to Ferris as his ‘‘predecessor’’ in the Venetian ambassadorship. (Although Hawthorne did not, strictly speaking, precede Howells’s service as consul in Venice [1861–1864], he did serve as an American consul abroad, in Liverpool, after which he lived in Italy for two years. In 1863, Howells and his wife made a pilgrimage to the house in Florence where Hawthorne had stayed.) What is striking about the Hawthornesque romantic picture of the isolated artist/scientist in A Foregone Conclusion is that it is one which the protagonist deeply desires yet painfully refuses to paint: In those days, Ferris was an uncompromising enemy of the theatricalization of Italy, or indeed of anything; but the fancy of the blackrobed young priest at work in this place, appealed to him all the more potently because of the sort of tragic innocence which seemed to characterize Don Ippilito’s expression. He longed intensely to sketch the picture then and there, but he had strength to rebuke the fancy as something that could not make itself intelligible without the help of such accessories as he despised. (FC, 33)

Rebuking fancy, Ferris schools himself into painting Don Ippilito without ‘‘accessories.’’ Ferris’s portrait will not be, he insists, an allegorical genre painting nor a stylized Catholic picture of a saint, where identity rests on pose and props. But there are risks to such stripped-down realism. Florida Vervain makes those risks plain, asking Ferris, ‘‘why do you want to paint him simply as a priest? . . . I should think you would want to make him the centre of some famous or romantic scene.’’ ‘‘You’re

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no worse than the rest,’’ Ferris snaps (FC, 49). Florida here becomes the representative of the vulgar American audience, demanding conventions (Ferris is so enraged that he lists these: the priest administering extreme unction to a victim of the Council of Ten, the priest stepping into the confessional and leering at the young female penitent, gondolas, the Bridge of Sighs . . . ). Florida retorts that ‘‘people will wonder why you came so far to paint Father O’Brien’’ unless Ferris includes ‘‘some sort of symbol in your picture of a Venetian priest’’ (FC, 50). That is, for Americans, unless a priest is clearly designated as Italian, set in what Hawthorne calls ‘‘a sort of poetic or fairy precinct,’’ 22 he is a figure with whom they are all too familiar: at best, a vulgar, ill-educated immigrant; at worst, a demagogue leading his flock in a fight against good American citizens. In Becoming American, Thomas Archdeacon underscores what Florida Vervain knows—that anti-Catholic and anti-Irish stories and stereotypes continued to be a feature of literate American life after the Civil War: ‘‘Calling attention to the social and political threat posed by the Irish became an obsession of the higher toned newspapers and periodicals of the late nineteenth century.’’ 23 As editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Howells is well aware of what his genteel readership thinks of Father O’Brien. The American audience’s understanding of ‘‘the real’’—Father O’Brien and his apelike flock—like its expectations for the familiarly romantic—Mrs. Radcliffe— define Howells’s dilemma. Like Ferris, Howells is committed to realism, but rejecting romantic cliche´s seems to leave Hawthorne’s successors trapped in a two-dimensional imitative literalism. The romance of Roman Catholicism attracts the American artist because of its ability to point to the mysterious. Think of Hawthorne’s complaint about America: ‘‘no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.’’ 24 After the war, Howells regards ambivalently the romantic knowledge that hovers beyond us— the balloon cut free from Earth, to use James’s famous metaphor. What is Ferris’s alternative artistic vision? Nothing more, it turns out, than a list of alternate types: the pagan, the martyr, the rebel, the Jesuit ( FC, 50). Ferris’s ‘‘priest’’ is as cliche´d as Florida’s ‘‘Venetian priest.’’ And Ferris’s finished picture, tainted by his presuppositions about Italian priests, ‘‘is,’’ as Ferris admits, ‘‘conventional, in spite of everything’’ ( FC, 118). Don Ippilito astutely remarks: ‘‘I suppose that it resembles me a great deal . . . and yet I do not feel like that. . . . It is as I should be if I were like other priests, perhaps?’’ ( FC, 118). Exposing conventions, even as he draws on them, Howells gives us multiple pictures of Don Ippilito—both those that Ferris creates and those that he rejects. Ferris may not depict the Hawthorne scene of Don

Ippilito in his oratory, but Howells certainly does. Just as Howells needs Hawthorne as his point of reference, A Foregone Conclusion needs ‘‘a priest,’’ needs ‘‘Romanism,’’ as well as the conventions, types, and plots of anti-Catholicism. But the modern novelist can only safely replicate these cliche´d plots and figures by ironizing them. (And, of course, in ironizing his relationship with the past and its plots, Howells is following Hawthorne even more precisely.) ‘‘The tragedy of Don Ippilito’’ ( FC, 171) is how terribly untragic he is. As a ‘‘modern’’ writer, Howells shows Catholicism neither ennobling nor gothically destroying Don Ippilito’s life, but wasting it, making him into a comic, pathetic character. Because he uses Don Ippilito to these ironic ends, Howells only hints at what the ‘‘man’’ ‘‘trapped’’ in ‘‘a priest’’ might look like; as Don Ippilito says to Florida, ‘‘I have given you the slight outward events, not the processes of my mind’’ (FC, 92). Nonetheless, Howells does forge a new psychological realism in the priest’s workshop (and here, too, Hawthorne is a primary source) by using the character of Don Ippilito to show us the processes of Ferris’s and Florida’s minds. ‘‘Priest’’ is a medium for exploration, and shoring up, of American Protestant maleness (Franchot), standing at once for the masculinity that Ferris fears he lacks and for that lack itself (Habegger). The women in the novel see priest’s clothing as a soldier’s uniform for those ‘‘who fight the spiritual enemies,’’ comparing Don Ippilito to the late Colonel Vervain ( FC, 52). Ferris, by contrast, does not put on the uniform that defines contemporary American maleness until the very end of the novel.25 In acting as American consul in Venice, Howells, like his character Ferris, avoided service in the Union Army. His biographers and critics have long noted Howells’s continuing preoccupation with this failure to participate in the defining experience of mid-century American manhood.26 Howells glosses his own situation in the opening sentence of A Fearful Responsibility (1882): ‘‘Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse of turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble.’’ 27 A Foregone Conclusion explores precisely this anxiety, not simply through Ferris’s character alone but through the triangulated relations among a man, a woman, and a priest. Don Ippilito at once stands in contrast to and is deeply imbricated in the historical identity of the American male. The Italian priest caricatures two representative images of successful American maleness at mid-century: the inventor and the soldier. The weapons that the priest invents are comically flawed; the priest’s habit resembles not only a soldier’s uniform but also a woman’s

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‘‘skirt,’’ as we are repeatedly reminded. When Don Ippilito describes a night out dressed in lay clothing, Ferris’s reaction is especially— even embarrassingly—telling: ‘‘[The] story affected Ferris like that of some girl’s adventure in men’s clothes. He was in terror lest Mrs. Vervain should be going to say it was like that; she was going to say something; he made haste to forestall her and turn the talk on other things’’ ( FC, 52). In this revealing progression, Ferris’s reaction to Don Ippilito’s revelation that he exceeds the category ‘‘priest’’ becomes a narrative of cross-dressing and gender confusion, which is then attributed to the woman, causing a frantic attempt to silence and control the (his) female speaking self. Stringing together his clauses with semicolons, Howells emphasizes his representation of the process—and the frenetic pace— of Ferris’s thought. This projective anxiety about what a woman thinks pervades A Foregone Conclusion, although its object is typically Florida rather than her mother. While Howells does not depict Florida as tempted by the confessional like Hawthorne’s Hilda,28 he does show Ferris worriedly monitoring her ‘‘devoutness’’ (FC, 47), especially because she attends High Church services. Frightened by Florida’s ‘‘passionate nature,’’ Ferris seems eager, as the novel’s title indicates, to read her as a character in a well-known story of female infidelity.29 Howells’s 1865 New York Times attack on priestly celibacy was not so much directed at clerical sexual abstinence as at what he sees as the illicit sexual activities that result from Italian priests being forbidden to marry. Calling upon the imagination of his Protestant American readership, an imagination wellversed in stories of priestly sexual corruption, he confidently assumes that ‘‘[t]he reader will readily figure these things to himself.’’ 30 Allowing marriage among the priesthood ‘‘will do more than any other [step] to advance social purity and religious freedom and independence’’ in Italy, Howells declares.31 In A Foregone Conclusion, the woman’s relationship with a priest—a relationship that Protestants already ‘‘know’’ all about—is represented by Howells as a test of the American woman’s suitability for marriage. The speech from Othello that provides Howells with the phrase ‘‘a foregone conclusion’’ illustrates how revelatory female ‘‘guilt’’ is of male anxiety. Told by Iago of Cassio’s supposed dream about Desdemona, Othello declares, ‘‘But this denoted a foregone conclusion: / ’Tis a shrewd doubt, though it be but a dream.’’ 32 Othello’s conclusion proceeds from pointedly sketchy evidence—the report of Cassio’s dream of kissing Desdemona. Similarly, Ferris’s foregone conclusions about ‘‘the priest’’ and Florida’s love allow Howells’s exploration of his American protagonist’s anxious masculinity: ‘‘Ferris came back and looked dizzily

at the priest, trying to believe that this unhuman, sacerdotal phantasm had been telling him that it loved a beautiful young girl of his own race, faith and language. . . . It was all a shapeless torment; it held him like the memory of some hideous nightmare prolonging its horror beyond sleep’’ ( FC, 125–26). Ferris experiences the priest’s sexuality as uncanny—at once foreign (an ‘‘unhuman’’ threat to one of ‘‘his own race, faith and language’’) and familiar (‘‘like the memory’’). The male figure is a ‘‘phantasm’’ or ‘‘nightmare,’’ Ferris’s fancy crossing over into the real, the repressed returning. Such language encourages us to see Don Ippilito as a version or aspect of Ferris, fearful to himself. Earlier, Ferris claims that the priest’s vows, his ‘‘sentence of death,’’ makes him ‘‘dreadful’’ ( FC, 100). Perhaps Ferris and Howells, like the priest, will return to life only to find that they are the undead, that they have no place in modern America. Don Ippilito’s role as an antique mirror for contemporary American masculinity crystallizes in what we might call the novel’s ‘‘primal scene.’’ Here, the figure of the priest as the feminized male resonates with Howells’s generational need to regard romance as ‘‘feminine’’ and realism as ‘‘masculine.’’ 33 Hawthorne and Don Ippilito, insistently denigrated as childish throughout A Foregone Conclusion, nonetheless father the American writer’s sexuality. Howells succumbs to temptation in the garden, setting the moment of revelation in the realm of ‘‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’’: Ferris sees Florida kiss Don Ippilito at a ruined fountain in the midst of a garden, a place where Ferris has earlier poisoned Florida’s mind with an ‘‘ultimate drop of venom’’ ( FC, 61). Watching, Ferris receives a traumatic and shaping shock to his masculinity: Ferris stepped back again into the shadow of the tree from which he had just emerged, and clung to its trunk lest he should fall. Another seemed to creep out of the court in his person, and totter across the white glare of the campo and down the blackness of the calle. In the intersected spaces where the moonlight fell, this alien, miserable man saw the figure of a priest gliding on before him. (FC, 139)

Howells’s scene of sexual discovery (like so many in Hawthorne’s, as well as James’s, fiction) involves an adult, not a child, witness and a male, not a female, wound.34 Seeing sexuality so unmans Ferris that he must hide. Howells underscores his protagonist’s shame at revealed weakness by having ‘‘Ferris’’ disappear into syntactic ambiguity as the paragraph progresses (‘‘Another . . . in his person . . . this alien miser-

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able man’’). The male identities cross and exchange across a topography of light and darkness, which figures exposure and repression, suggesting movement between consciousness and the unconscious. And the conventional ‘‘figure of a priest gliding’’ across the Hawthornian ‘‘intersected spaces where the moonlight fell’’ acts, again, as a vehicle for Howells to transverse the romantic and the real. Yet this moment of confrontation is to a large extent repressed by the novel’s conclusion. The occlusion results in part from Howells’s acquiescence to demands from his audience and publisher for a happy ending.35 The American man must marry the American girl. In contrast, the Italian priest meets a feminized— or at least a demasculinized— end: Failing to win the woman, find work, or get to America, he returns to what is represented as his primitive, superstitious faith and dies of unrequited love. Nonetheless, Howells hints at the Italian priest’s ironic necessity in the formation—and, as I have suggested, formulation— of the modern American couple. Don Ippilito is said to pervade the couple’s selfdefinition: ‘‘They spoke of Don Ippilito as if he were a part of their love’’ ( FC, 169). Ferris and Florida are, in fact, reunited by the painting of Don Ippilito, a work that the penniless Ferris is vainly trying to sell. And, in addition to its role in A Foregone Conclusion’s final plot mechanics, the portrait of Don Ippilito serves here, as it did earlier, as a vehicle for Howells’s delineation of his artistic dilemma in 1874. Ferris, faced with the conflict between his realist aesthetic and his audience’s (and his own) preconceptions regarding ‘‘an Italian priest,’’ paints only a failed portrait that satisfies neither. Howells tries to solve the problem differently. He gives us romance—‘‘the tragedy of Don Ippilito’’—as well as the happily ending love story that his audience demanded, but tries to do so within the parameters of a realist novel. One way for Howells to have his romance and snub it too is through an uneven, ironic narratorial tone, a tone that pervades A Foregone Conclusion but is nowhere more evident than in the novel’s closing pages. The mildly mocking narrative voice maintains A Foregone Conclusion’s readers at a careful distance from the novel’s concluding resolution of the protagonist’s professional and personal dilemmas. Ferris is pointedly portrayed as overly insistent in his attempts to belittle Don Ippilito. Lolling on the cushions of a gondola, Ferris snipes, ‘‘That story he told you of his childhood and of how he became a priest: didn’t it strike you at the time like rather a made-up, melodramatic history?’’ (FC, 170). In an all-too-familiar Americanist formulation, Ferris claims that, in blaming circumstances rather than looking into himself, the Italian priest revealed his ‘‘inadequacy.’’ This failure to make his own way and

self, to be like Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables or an Horatio Alger character, is, Ferris implies, a failure to be male in a recognizably American way. But this is a criticism, the narrator has let us know, that might just as easily be made of Ferris himself. Although he has become, in one sense, the complete American man, having acquired a uniform, a war wound, and a wife, these achievements have been drawn into question. Ferris does not work for a living nor is he a professional artist; even the all-important war wound is belittled (‘‘to hear her [Florida] you would suppose no one had ever been shot in the service of his country’’ [ FC, 168]). Having destabilized both Ferris’s success story and the happy marriage plot, the narrative voice at once advances and undercuts the contemporary American artist’s final dismissal of the Italian priest and all that he represents. ‘‘People are never equal to the romance of their youth in after life,’’ the narrator of A Foregone Conclusion punningly informs us ( FC, 168). Howells positions himself both against and within a story of American male success and failure in part by invoking and dismissing Hawthornian romance. What I would suggest is that the uneven and ambivalent tone with which A Foregone Conclusion describes its protagonist is at least in part a function of the fact that his antagonist is a man in a skirt. The Italian priest, with Howells’s associations with the past, with the feminized man, and with the literary father, is an overdetermined figure for the fears facing an American male writer of Howells’s generation. Romance, gliding darkly into Howells’s fiction by means of the plots and figures of anti-Catholicism, is at once archaic, absurd, and necessary.

notes 1. William Dean Howells, ‘‘Marriage among the Italian Priesthood,’’ New York Times, 19 October 1965, 4. 2. William Dean Howells, A Foregone Conclusion. Novels 1875–1886 (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1–171. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and abbreviated FC. 3. Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 83. 4. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xvii. 5. Edwin H. Cady, The Road to Realism: The Early Years 1837–1885 of William Dean Howells (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1956), 189. 6. Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Alfred

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Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 7. Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism, 244. 8. Jackson T. Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 –1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981). 9. On Howells’s attitudes regarding Italian politics and on his time in Italy generally, see James L. Woodress, Jr., Howells and Italy (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952). 10. On nineteenth-century Protestant American attitudes toward Catholicism, see Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800 –1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1964); Franchot, Roads to Rome; Susan M. Griffin, ‘‘Awful Disclosures: Women’s Evidence in the Escaped Nun’s Tale,’’ PMLA 111 (1996): 93–107. 11. Howells remarks approvingly Jane Austen’s satiric treatment of Radcliffe in ‘‘Jane Austen,’’ in W. D. Howells as Critic, ed. Edwin H. Cady (London: Routledge, 1973), 314–33. 12. On American nativism in the 1860s and 1870s, see Thomas J. Archdeacon, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (New York: Free, 1983), and John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Literature (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988). 13. For James’s reviews, see Henry James: Literary Criticism. Vol. 1: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), 485– 97. 14. Michael Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79. 15. James, Literary Criticism, 492– 93. 16. Woodress, Howells and Italy, 157. 17. Ibid. 18. James, Literary Criticism, 488–89. Apparently, it was a memory that lasted at least until the composition of The Golden Bowl, where this image recurs in the descriptions of Charlotte’s situation. 19. Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism, 246– 47. 20. James, Literary Criticism, 486. 21. Nathaniel Hawthorne, preface to The House of Seven Gables, in Collected Novels, ed. Millicent Bell (New York: Library of America, 1983), 351. 22. Hawthorne, preface to The Marble Faun, 854. 23. Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American, 100. 24. Hawthorne, preface to The Marble Faun, 854. 25. Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1973). 26. For example, see Cady, The Road to Realism; John W. Crowley, The Black Heart’s Truth (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1956) and The Mask of Fiction: Essays on William Dean Howells (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989); and Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt, 1970).

27. William Dean Howells, A Fearful Responsibility and Tonelli’s Marriage (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Company, 1882), 1. 28. On the Protestant girl and the Catholic confessional, see Susan Bernstein, Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); G. F. A. Best, ‘‘Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain,’’ in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain, ed. Robert Robson (London: Bell, 1967); Franchot, Roads to Rome; Susan M. Griffin, ‘‘The Discourse Within: Feminism and Intradisciplinary Study,’’ Arizona Quarterly 44.4 (Winter 1989): 1–13. 29. See Elizabeth Stevens Prioleau, The Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983), for an extended reading of the novel’s sexual triangle. 30. Howells, ‘‘Marriage,’’ 4. 31. Ibid. 32. Shakespeare, Othello, 3.3, 428–29. 33. See Bell, The Problem of American Realism, and Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism. 34. Susan M. Griffin, ‘‘Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of Jamesian Masculinity,’’ Arizona Quarterly 53.4 (Winter 1997): 61–82; Kaja Silverman, ‘‘Too Early/Too Late: Subjectivity and the Primal Scene in Henry James,’’ Novel 21 (1988): 147–73; and William Veeder, ‘‘The Consolations of Time,’’ Henry James Review 18 (1996): 230 – 41. 35. See Cady, ‘‘The Road to Realism,’’ and Lynn, William Dean Howells.

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‘‘the connecting link of centuries’’ melville, rome, and the mediterranean, 1856 –1857

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On entering Rome itself, the visitor is greeted by thousands of statues, who, as representatives of the mighty past, hold out their hands to the present, and make the connecting link of centuries. herman melville, ‘‘statues in rome’’

Rome and the Mediterranean fascinated Herman Melville as early as 1849, when, having barely set foot in England on a journey nominally to arrange for the English publication of White-Jacket, he sketched a plan for traveling across Europe for the Levant: ‘‘I am full ( just now) of this glorious Eastern jaunt. Think of it!—Jerusalem & the Pyramids—Constantinople, the Egean, & old Athens!’’ 1 Above all, Melville hoped to see Rome. A light purse and ‘‘the cursed state of the copyright’’ ( J, 20) put an end to his daydream, and when he returned to England en route to the Holy Land seven years and five books later, he was an altered man. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he visited in Liverpool, found him ‘‘much overshadowed since I saw him last,’’ 2 as well he might be, having lost his novelistic audience in Pierre and written himself into a labyrinth of skepticism in The Confidence-Man. The trip to Europe and the midEast was the gift of his father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, prompted in large part by family concern over physical and psychological ailments that seemed to threaten outright collapse. Hawthorne noted that Melville journeyed light, ‘‘taking only a carpet-bag to hold all his travelling-gear’’ (EN, 170). So Melville liked to imagine himself figuratively—a free sensibility responding to the impressions of time and place, much as he envisioned his proposed ‘‘saturation . . . with the atmosphere of Jerusalem’’ ( J, 86). But Melville in 1856–1857 was hardly a tabula rasa. He was laden with the weight

of an irresolvable spiritual crisis and of a quarrel with his American audience, and therefore with contemporary America itself, which had led him to question humanity, society, and the course of history as for years he had been questioning God. He also carried with him patterns of thought and imagination, clusters of feeling, and tangles of psychic need, as well as the attitudes and images inscribed in his writing. Before he ever saw it, Egypt evoked for him the Pyramids, hieroglyphics, sphinxes, and mummies he had used as symbols in Moby-Dick and Pierre; Palestine stood forth in the landscape of the Old Testament and the dread image of Jehovah; and Rome lived in the classics and in the acquaintance with ancient history he absorbed from his irregular education and eclectic reading, ‘‘brought to a focus,’’ as Merton M. Sealts, Jr., suggested, by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.3 Indeed, declension seems to have been his a priori framework for experiencing the Mediterranean world just as it seemed the felt truth of his recent emotional and vocational life. Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein has called Melville’s travels ‘‘an end, not a beginning’’; ‘‘in spite of the restoring effect on his health,’’ she argued, ‘‘the journey to the Mediterranean did not influence Melville’s idea of man and God.’’ 4 Of God, no, beyond the incalculable effect of making vivid to the senses and the imagination what he already believed with the intellect; of man, yes, so far as the East presented him with a spectacle of polyglot humanity in the mass he had not witnessed to a comparable degree either in America or in Europe. But the great legacy of Melville’s travels was for his idea of history and America’s place in history, and in this respect his experience in Rome might be called pivotal. The Orient dis-oriented Melville and then, with time, helped reorient him in a way that dissolved his New World provincialisms and enabled the more sweepingly historical vision of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) and Clarel (1876). For Melville as for Hawthorne, Rome was a layered city: classical Rome, Christian Rome, modern Rome. It was the first of these that counted most for Melville in the late winter of 1857 when he spent nearly a month in Rome, along with briefer stays in Naples, Florence, and other cities. Had he visited Rome on his way to the Holy Land rather than on his return, his responses might have been quite different, for if it was a wintry but energetic Melville that set out exploring the Mediterranean world, it was an emotionally and spiritually exhausted one, demoralized by old ideas and therefore peculiarly receptive to new ones, who visited the Italian galleries housing the ancient world. In short, ‘‘Rome’’ took its meaning for Melville partly from the chronology of the inadvertent quest romance that unfolded during his trav-

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els, recorded in his 1856–1857 Journal in a style somewhere between a Whitmanesque catalog and a long telegram, though not without passages of sustained reflection. The ‘‘plot’’ of this romance—a reflection of the patterns of Melville’s mind rather than of any conscious literary intention—is that of a pilgrimage backward in time through the strata of Western civilization to confront the ontological core of life and explore the ways in which various cultures have responded to it. At times, circumstances seemed to cooperate with the imagination to give the terse notations a mythic resonance. As if by a preordained irony, the steamer that carried Melville from Constantinople to Alexandria was the Arcadia, commanded by a Captain Orpheus. It was the only Arcadia Melville was to see— and the only Orpheus. Flanked on one side by the dignity of classical Greece, on the other by his recollections of the freshness of Polynesia, the legendary Greek islands seemed to Melville ‘‘worn’’ and ‘‘meagre, like life after enthusiasm is gone’’ ( J, 72). ‘‘They look like the isles of absentees— / Gone whither?’’ he would later ask in the poem ‘‘The Archipelago.’’ 5 Sometimes the absentees seemed all the more conspicuous for their descendants’ physical presence. Visiting Syra, a bustling nautical hub, Melville was struck in the ‘‘New Town’’ by dock workers and merchants with ‘‘fine forms’’ and ‘‘noble faces’’ garbed with a quaint ‘‘theatrical’’ impracticality as if trade were new and still an innocent pastime, and in the ‘‘Old Town’’ by ‘‘a union of [the] picturesque and poverty stricken,’’ with some of the ‘‘old men look[ing] like Pericles reduced to a chiffonier’’ ( J, 53, 54). This was Arcadian Greece for Melville, desiccated and crumbling in the background, colorful but spiritually diminished in the foreground, the lineaments of the past surviving chiefly as a reminder of descent. Physical ruin was everywhere, the casualty of neglect and plunder. In Salonica Melville noted the dilapidated Roman arch and the mosque with pieces of ceiling mosaic raining down upon the floor; ‘‘brought away several’’ ( J, 55), he confessed, joining in the plunder himself. Against this backdrop of former grandeur was teeming humanity—‘‘an immense accumulation of the rags of all nations’’ ( J, 56), Melville described the crowd debarking from a Salonica steamer, a world-ship of the mid-East as the Fide`le in The Confidence-Man had been of the American West. Constantinople was the modern Levant in extremis and the inmost circle of this alien, intriguing hell, if anything so conspicuously nonChristian can be called Dantesque. Ill-equipped to appreciate the intricacies of Islamic culture, Melville saw what any casual Western traveler would see—poverty, filth, and the ubiquitous ‘‘swarms,’’ ‘‘crowds,’’

and ‘‘mobs,’’ dizzying in their numbers and Babel of tongues and all but oblivious to the ruins of a monumental past.6 ‘‘In these lofty arches, ivied & weatherbeaten, & still grand,’’ he wrote of an ancient aqueduct, ‘‘the ghost of Rome seems to stride with disdain of the hovels of this part of Stamboul’’ ( J, 62). Melville rarely interprets; he simply notes. But his notations themselves mount to significance as he marks the contrast between classical order and beauty and contemporary disrepair—statues with their ‘‘[h]eads broken off,’’ masonry ‘‘[l]eaning over & frittered away’’ ( J, 59), a Roman arch with ‘‘fine sculpture’’ about the base and ‘‘miserable buildings of wood’’ around it ( J, 55). The chaos is replicated for Melville in the human world of the Bazaar, ‘‘a wilderness of traffic’’ where ‘‘[y]ou loose [sic] yourself & are bewildered & confounded with the labyrinth, the din, the barbaric confusion of the whole’’ ( J, 60). Throughout the Journal, whether in Constantinople, Syra, or Egypt, Melville struggles with an almost panicked sense of physical and psychological suffocation, trying repeatedly ‘‘to get up aloft,’’ ‘‘see [his] way out,’’ and ‘‘[s]oar out of the maze’’ ( J, 58). From the top of the Serasker Tower, ‘‘my God, what a view! Surpasses everything’’ ( J, 60), he exclaims, as though the antidotes to the oppressiveness of the East were oxygen and topographical perspective. The strangeness of Eastern culture might have been cause enough for anxiety—‘‘Curious to stand amid these millions of fellow beings . . . with one consent rejecting much of our morality & all of our religion’’ ( J, 65)—yet Melville had been a latitudinarian since his early years in the Pacific. Nor was he prone to the kind of racial and national mythmaking that Edward W. Said in Orientalism associates with nineteenth-century Anglo-French colonialism. Where contemporary traveler George William Curtis saw the lethargy of the East as portending Eastern domination by the West or adoption of Western ways,7 Melville regarded the East less in relation to an imperialist future than to its imperial past. What appalled him in Salonica and still more in Constantinople was not squalor so much as a clamorous disharmony (so it seemed to the outsider) amid the vestiges of toppled Roman order, as if it were structures alone, physical and civil walls, that kept humanity from lapsing into a Hobbesian state of nature like the packs of wild dogs that roamed the streets ‘‘in bands like prairie wolves’’ ( J, 67). Revisiting the Serasker Tower, Melville remarked on ‘‘[a]n immense column of the Saracenic order. Colossal Saracens. Saw drill of Turkish troops there. Disciplining the barbarians’’ ( J, 64). Is the ‘‘immense column’’ an architectural feature or a file of soldiers? And does ‘‘colossal Saracens’’ refer to the civilization that built the tower, to the imposing mi-

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litia that kept order at its base, or, by an imaginative elision, to both at once? Without intending meaning, Melville’s language suggests a mind at work joining impressions into what will later coalesce into meaning— specifically, into the theme of moral and political order that will counterbalance his commitment to natural rights and bring forward the dialectic between progressive and conservative impulses implicit even in early works like White-Jacket. In Battle-Pieces the speaker of ‘‘The HouseTop’’ (one of several sternly ‘‘Roman’’ poems) goes aloft to survey and moralize upon the destructiveness of the New York draft riots of 1863, an antigovernment, anti-Negro uprising of the Irish quelled, after arson, looting, and racial murder, by military force: 210

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All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe— Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve And man rebounds whole eons back in nature. (Poems)

Melville is writing about the temporary abrogation of two forms of Roman rule (republican citizenship and Catholic hierarchy), but his deeper subject is the liability to violence sourced in human nature and contained for a time by law and convention but never eradicated. The threat of social dissolution is what Melville’s ‘‘Romans’’ (civil and churchly) understood and shaped their philosophies and institutions to fend against, at best with enlightened authority, at worst with tyrannical force. The relationship between nature, human nature, salutary social forms, and repressive power would become a major theme in BattlePieces, in Part IV of Clarel, and in Billy Budd, where Vere’s ‘‘forms, measured forms,’’ 8 though by no means Melville’s own in principle or application, reflect Melville’s general belief that human beings needed to be persuaded, charmed, or coerced by structures of some sort that can have no transcendent authority. The emotional root of Melville’s reaction against popular democracy was his bitterness toward his American audience; the role of his Mediterranean experience was to dramatize and measurably deepen his feeling by displaying the problem of civilization upon a visible sociohistorical canvas. In this respect, the Mediterranean, and Rome in particular, served Melville as it had earlier served the painter Thomas Cole. Frustrated by the conditions of artistic production in America,9 Cole gradually came to question not the ideal of republican government but its realization in Jacksonian America. His

five-painting series The Course of Empire was ‘‘conceived during his first visit to Italy in 1829–32,’’ 10 where his vocational and political anxieties coalesced in a cyclical view of history patterned upon Italian experience but taken to apply to all civilizations, America’s included, or perhaps America’s in particular. Cole never entirely lost his feeling of American exceptionalism, if ‘‘exceptionalism’’ means a belief in the uniqueness and prototypal importance of the American experiment; yet America’s status as ‘‘ ‘the hope of the wise and the good’’’ by no means exempted it in Cole’s eyes from the perils of empire, the most dangerous of which came from its lurking susceptibility to corruption and tyranny. For Melville, too, America was ‘‘the world’s fairest hope,’’ as he wrote in ‘‘Misgivings’’ (line 7, Poems), but in Battle-Pieces, drawing upon the lessons illustrated in the Mediterranean, he framed the problem of America within a vision of the precariousness of empire. The uncompleted iron dome of the Capitol is Melville’s symbol of imperial ambition analogous to the classical edifices and monuments in Cole’s The Consummation of Empire. The rebel South is the specific political threat to American success, the crime of slavery the specific moral threat; yet both are presented by Melville as manifestations of an abiding evil that can erupt periodically to overturn the settled order and confute meliorist dreams of inexorable progress. The New York draft riots were one such eruption, the war itself another, the vindictiveness of the triumphant North a third. But the enduring truth of events went deeper still to suggest a fragility Melville will not let the victors ignore: So, then, solidity’s a crust— The core of fire below. All may go well for many a year, But who can think without a fear Of horrors that happen so? (‘‘The Apparition,’’ lines 11–15, Poems)

Although far from fatalistic (its prose ‘‘Supplement’’ is an ardent call for political action), Battle-Pieces counters American millenarianism with an insistence on the forces always present to make for dissolution. Gibbon may have been an important source for Melville’s thoughts on empire, but, as with Cole, the experience of moving among evidences of historical decline, especially as they answered to private grievances about America, encouraged and incipiently patterned structures of feeling that would later evolve into articulate thought. The denuded Greek islands, corresponding to Cole’s fifth canvas, Desolation, spoke to Melville of a level of civilization that had been but no longer was—a memento mori for chauvinist America to ponder—while the juxtaposition

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of classical rubble and human rabble in Constantinople seemed tangible proof of both the necessity and the impermanence of civilizing forms. The more ruinous sections of Cairo reinforced the lessons of Constantinople, but the striking ‘‘contiguity of desert & verdure, splendor & squalor, gloom & gayety’’ ( J, 74) also raised metaphysical questions of the sort Melville had explored through the opposition of sea and land in Moby-Dick, mountain and plain in Pierre. Seen from a distance, the Pyramids were ‘‘purple like mountains’’ ( J, 75), recalling the beckoning sterility of the purplish Titantic mountains near Pierre’s Saddle Meadows; up close, they were desert-colored, barren, and seemed ageless, coeval almost with Creation itself and belonging neither to nature nor to man ( J, 76). ‘‘Vast, indefinite, incomprehensible, and awful’’ ( J, 76), the Pyramids struck Melville as an emanation of the spirit of Egyptian priestcraft, which, by way of Moses’ immersion ‘‘in all the lore of the Egyptians’’ ( J, 75; see Acts 7 : 22), formatively influenced the Hebraic idea of Jehovah. A ‘‘[t]errible mixture of the cunning and awful,’’ Melville called this pyramid-‘‘born’’ deity ( J, 75), voicing one strain of his lifelong attitude toward the Judeo-Christian God. By contrast, areas of Cairo were tropically lush and as removed in spirit from the Pyramids as they were near in distance: Avenues of acac[i]as & other trees. Shrubs. Seems country. No fences. The booth & cafes. Leapers, tumblers, jugglers, smokers, dancers, horses, swings, (with bells) sherbert, &c. Lovely at evening. In morning, golden sun through foliage. Soft luxurious splendor of mornings. Dewy. Paridise [sic] melted & poured into the air. Soft intoxication; no wonder these people never drink wine. ( J, 76–77)

In Cairo it was ‘‘hard to believe you are near the pyramids’’ ( J, 76), yet the two stood juxtaposed almost as panels in a diptych or as thesis and antithesis within a cosmic dialectic yet to be resolved: ‘‘Line of desert & verdure, plain as line between good & evil. An instant collision of the two elements. A long billow of desert forever hovers as in act of breaking, upon the verdure of Egypt’’ ( J, 76). Oceanic desert and fertile land, the realm of divinity and the compensatory realm on man: so Melville inscribed the landscape with the antimonies of Moby-Dick and Pierre. But which was ‘‘good’’ and which ‘‘evil’’? Was the ‘‘soft luxuriousness’’ of Cairo a deliverance from the desert (as place and symbol) or a dissipating evasion of it? The possibility of a carnivalesque hedonism in proximity to physical and metaphysical blight intrigued Melville and left him deeply ambivalent. ‘‘May one be gay upon the Encantadas?’’ 12 he had recently asked

of another blasted world, the Galapagos Islands. May one be gay living beside the Pyramids, he now seemed to wonder of Cairo. Evidently one could. The whole city seemed to him ‘‘one booth and Bartholomew Fair—a grand masquerade of mortality’’ ( J, 73), with only the ‘‘multitudes of blind men—worst city in the world for them. . . . Too much light & no defence against it’’ ( J, 74)—to serve as a reminder of the awfulness of unmediated truth; even the Sphinx had its ‘‘back to the desert & face to verdure’’ ( J, 76). Melville would soon find another ‘‘masquerade of mortality’’ among the Neapolitans dwelling under the shadow of Vesuvius; ‘‘skaters on ice’’ ( J, 105), he called them with mingled appreciation and disdain. Years later he would return to the theme in his poem ‘‘Naples in the Time of Bomba,’’ asking whether the ‘‘careless pleasure’’ he saw in the citizenry was ‘‘mirth’s true elation’’ or ‘‘a patched despair, / Bravery in tatters debonair, / True devil-maycare dilapidation’’ 13—a variety of Ishmael’s ‘‘genial, desperado philosophy’’ 14 but without the ballast of genuine philosophy. What he remarked of Naples—‘‘The beauty of the place, in connection with its perilousness’’ ( J, 105)—might be said ontologically, he knew, of virtually any place. Could a life of Epicurean delight be fashioned from a confrontation with the terrifying rather than a studied avoidance of it? Or did modernity—as in the Greek islands, in Egypt, in Naples— characteristically involve a suppression of the tragic whose effect was to trivialize human life? Even in the barest of the journal entries Melville seems to be revolving the question of how to live. So far as traditional belief was concerned, Egypt awoke in him a kind of deconstructive historicism. From ‘‘the rude elements of the insignificant [i.e., unsignifying] thoughts that are in all men’’ ( J, 78) and the ‘‘diabolical landscapes’’ of Judea, the Egyptian priests and later the Jewish prophets shaped a ‘‘ghastly theology’’ ( J, 89), which events converged to establish in the West as hegemonic truth. Yet understanding the historical contingency of religion, as he imagined it, did not enable Melville to free himself from its sway. In its ‘‘unleavened nakedness of desolation’’ ( J, 83), the desert remained for him (like oceans, mountains, and prairies, but more frightfully) a mirror of the Divine—the substratal reality on which all truthful philosophies had to rest and against which they needed to erect whatever viable human order they could. Clarel would begin his pilgrimage in Jerusalem and then venture out to the Judean wilderness to confront this stark reality; Melville’s own journey through the Holy Land followed the opposite course, recapitulating Biblical history as it traced a circuit through the lands of the Old Testament before substantially exploring Jerusalem, the climactic site

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of the New Testament. Melville’s questers in Clarel —Celio, Nathan, Rolfe, Mortmain, Clarel himself—gravitate toward the Holy Land to find meaning in origins: ‘‘Some lurking thing [Rolfe] hoped to gain— / Slip quite behind the parrot-lore / Conventional, and——what attain?’’ 15 Rolfe’s question had probably been Melville’s own, and although Melville found no more definite answer to it than Rolfe would, the mere fact of treading Biblical ground may have brought matters to an emotional head. Except perhaps by climbing Mount Sinai, Melville could scarcely have come nearer the Old Testament Jehovah than he did at the Dead Sea, thirteen hundred feet below sea level and the legendary site of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet most of Judea was blighted for Melville, as it was for other travelers. ‘‘Palestine is desolate and unlovely,’’ Mark Twain observed. ‘‘And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?’’ 16 Melville asked the opposite question: ‘‘Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favorites of heaven’’ ( J, 91; emphasis added). Melville may have been thinking of the fate of Pip in Moby-Dick or of Ishmael’s ‘‘wilful travellers in Lapland’’ who gaze themselves blind at the whiteness of Creation (MD, 414, 195). His language, in any case, is rhetorical and emotive; it answers a psychological need more than it advances a serious intellectual proposition. Melville knows he is melodramatizing—personifying the impersonal—but postures like this in letters, journal entries, reading marginalia, and books were a periodic necessity for a temperament that needed to relieve the strains of agnosticism through symbolic ventings of blasphemy. The entry follows upon a confession of utter disillusion—‘‘No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine’’ ( J, 91)—and its effect is to convert despondency and woundedness into cathartic aggression; it is Melville’s equivalent to Ahab’s grasping the lightning chains in ‘‘The Candles’’ or Pierre’s Enceladus dream, and although nothing could possibly come of it, the fact of having registered his protest unburdened Melville temporarily of its weight and restored him to the commonsense world of naturalism. In these terms, his Palestine journey was the physical enactment of a phase in the cycle of his being, but an enactment of such definitive sort—hunting God on His own ‘‘direful yet holy’’ ground (C 2, 12 : 89)—as to make all subsequent verbal gestures anticlimactic. Returning to Jerusalem, Melville shifted his attention from the Father to the Son. He visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ‘‘almost every day’’ ( J, 87), although repelled by the surrounding filth, the contempt of the Turkish guards, the venality of the local peddlers, and the sectarian squabbling of the devout and finding the tomb itself ‘‘a sick-

ening cheat’’ ( J, 88). Melville’s experience was common among Protestant travelers, who ‘‘were almost always skeptical about holy shrines’’ and ‘‘almost always disappointed’’ if ‘‘they expected these shrines to evoke a religious response in their hearts.’’ 17 The greatest threat to Christian belief, as traveler J. Ross Browne notes, was the historical site of Christendom itself.18 Faced with the discordance between ancient and modern Jerusalem, Mark Twain consigned the sacred Palestine of ‘‘poetry and tradition’’ to ‘‘dream-land.’’ 19 Charles Dudley Warner was even tempted to wish that Jerusalem had gone the way of Carthage so that ‘‘the modern pilgrim’’ might ‘‘choose a seat upon a fallen wall or mossy rock, and reconstruct for himself the pageant of the past, and recall that Living Presence, undisturbed by the impertinences which belittle the name of religion.’’ 20 For Melville the impertinences were not so easily dismissed. They were part of history, as the reduced state of the Greek islands was part of history, and the belittling of Christianity across nineteen hundred years—its fate in the world of power—spoke volumes about its practical meaning, although not about its sublimity as an idea. By returning daily to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre despite or perhaps because of its tawdry affronts to faith, Melville fanned the spirit of belief even as he distanced himself from its trappings and creeds. His emotional tie to Christianity would never be broken—‘‘The wrong / Of carpings never may undo / The nerves that clasp about the plea / Tingling with kinship through and through’’ (C 1, 3 : 114–17), he would write of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Clarel —but having fronted God (or God’s absence) in the desert and having detached historical Christianity from the figure of Jesus, he would increasingly make religion an inward matter whose sign was not doctrinal belief but an agnostic earnestness of seeking and caring. In focusing on the futility of Melville’s metaphysical speculations—‘‘It is strange how he persists . . . in wandering to-andfro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting’’ (EN, 163)—Hawthorne missed what Melville came to regard as the essential point. One didn’t need to get anywhere in terms of settled conviction; to live honestly and courageously under the pressures of spiritual life, resisting the lure of spurious certainty on one side and of atheistic materialism or shallow sensualism on the other, was to record one’s fitness for immortality whether or not immortality proved to be a fact. ‘‘If he were a religious man,’’ Hawthorne added, Melville ‘‘would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and [is] better worth immortality than most of us’’ (EN, 163). Melville was a religious man, after his fashion, and as he developed toward Clarel during the twenty years after his

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Mediterranean journey, Hawthorne’s sketch of him as a believer manque´ came to approximate his own view of the ungodly, godlike modern pilgrim and of himself.

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Newton Arvin spoke wisely when he referred to ‘‘the slow, uncertain, irregular, and always precarious, but nonetheless effectual process of healing that took place in the years’’ after The Confidence-Man and that ‘‘somehow’’ had its ‘‘curative’’ beginning in Melville’s trip to the midEast.21 The Journal is too desultory and cryptic to serve as spiritual autobiography, but if there was anything like a bottoming out for Melville in the Holy Land, its symbolic sites would likely have been the Dead Sea and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Athens and Rome, at any rate, directed Melville away from the problems of belief, and if for no other reason than this (and despite his physical weariness), they prompted an active curiosity amounting almost to renewal. Perhaps the most distinctive quality of the Greek landscape for Melville was that, though arid like Palestine’s, it was not harsh and forbidding. Nor was the aura of ancient Greece, embodied for him in the Parthenon, darkened by a grim, supernatural theology, or by any marked theology at all. The relationship between Egypt and Greece was, and still is, a matter of contention, as in Martin Bernal’s theory of the ‘‘Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization,’’ 22 which in Melville’s time had antecedents in developmental models of culture that saw Egypt ‘‘symboliz[ing] foundation’’ and Greece fulfillment, adding grace and refinement to ‘‘the austere grandeur of simple natural forms’’ as a flower succeeds to foliage.23 To Melville, in contrast, Greece was not the heir to Egypt and Palestine but the humanistic counterpoint, as Hellenism would later be championed by Matthew Arnold as a counterpoint to Hebraism. Melville’s journal entries on Greece and Italy are little more than a list of things seen and done; nonetheless, his jottings on the Acropolis are instructive about the tendencies of his mind: ‘‘Parthenon elevated like cross of Constantine. Strange contrast of rugged rock with polished temple. At Stirling [in Scotland]—art & nature correspond. Not so at Acropolis’’ ( J, 99). Melville’s reference is to the flaming cross in the sky seen by Constantine before the epochal battle at the Milvian Bridge. The Parthenon analogously seemed to Melville the marshaling symbol of a triumphant order, but one founded neither on the divine (Melville never regarded the Greek deities seriously) nor on the natural, but on artifice. Nature was ‘‘rugged,’’ the polis ‘‘polished.’’ Civilization, that

is to say, was a human construct wrought in ‘‘contrast’’ to nature, even against nature. When he came to poeticize his impressions of Greece and the Parthenon, perhaps as early as the late 1850s, Melville seemed to reverse himself and imply an art that imitated nature. As he wrote in ‘‘The Attic Landscape,’’ The clear-cut hills carved temples face, Respond, and share their cultural grace. ’Tis Art and Nature lodged together, Sister by sister, cheek to cheek; Such Art, such Nature, and such weather The All-in-All seems here a Greek. (lines 7–12, Poems)

Greek nature, however, is only ‘‘such Nature,’’ as Greek weather is ‘‘such weather’’—a felicitous local manifestation, not an ontological reality. With Greece as with Egypt, Melville seems to have recognized how climate and topography contributed to shape a culture and evoke its presiding gods, and how culture in turn projected itself back upon the landscape until even natural forms seemed to assume culture’s aspect—in Greece, culture’s clarity and grace; in Egypt, its otherworldly dread. In ‘‘The Apparition’’ (published in Timoleon [1891] and not to be confused with ‘‘The Apparition’’ of Battle-Pieces) Melville returns to the analogy of the Parthenon to Constantine’s cross—symbols elevated on a height, but one referring upward to a problematically ‘‘supernatural’’ source (line 5, Poems), the other ‘‘appealing down’’ to a naturalistically human one (line 6). A ‘‘Trophy of Adam’s best!’’ (line 6), the Parthenon represents a triumph of the harmoniously rational over the anarchic in nature, the terrifying in God, and the ungovernable in man. And yet the Parthenon as symbol of civic order has not endured except in the ‘‘long after-shine’’ of art (‘‘The Parthenon,’’ line 6). ‘‘The ancients of the ideal description,’’ Melville would write in ‘‘Statues in Rome,’’ ‘‘instead of trying to turn their impracticable chimeras, as does the modern dreamer, into social and political prodigies, deposited them in great works of art, which still live while states and constitutions have perished’’ (PT, 409). And yet, as Melville knew, the Greeks had tried to realize their ideal of civic life in material form. It was the permanence of their aesthetic success together with the impermanence of their political success that struck him as he contemplated the Parthenon, dis-

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posed as he was by his disaffections with America to deprecate the public world and seek the ideal inwardly in thought and art. Melville’s education in classical civilization continued in Italy, rarely without some tacit reference to his alienation from America. By the time he reached Rome and Florence, his eyes were bothering him severely, and the museums whose initial effect was ‘‘stunning’’ ( J, 108) eventually began to stun him in a more physical way. ‘‘‘It’s as bad as too much pain; it gets to be pain at last’’’ ( J, 114), he quoted a weary sightseer fresh (or stale) from the Uffizi. The bust of Tiberius in the Capitoline Museum prompted him to moralize on refinement and wickedness as the bust of Nero would prompt Hawthorne.24 But unlike Hawthorne, Melville typically viewed statuary and painting with an eye less to character than to history and the progress (or regress) of civilization. What impressed him most about Rome—ancient Rome—was the scale of life it evidenced. Words like ‘‘massive,’’ ‘‘majestic,’’ ‘‘colossal,’’ ‘‘gigantic,’’ and ‘‘grandeur’’ ( J, 106, 107) suggest an awe for the life-that-was, against which even Christian Rome (the exterior of St. Peter’s) seemed a diminishment and contemporary Rome (the parade of ‘‘fashion & Rank’’ on the Pincian Hill) a ‘‘[p]reposterous posturing’’—and this ‘‘within stone’s throw’’ of the ‘‘beautiful’’ bust of Antinous ( J, 106). ‘‘How little influence has truth on the world!’’ ( J, 106), Melville added, half ruefully, half in indignation. Returning to America in May 1857, Melville would never again regard the New World Ptolemaically, nor would his faith in ‘‘that free unshackled, democratic spirit of Christianity in all things’’ ( J, 248) that he associated with America at its best go unchallenged by the preChristian, undemocratic glories he had seen in Egypt, Greece, and Italy. Against the meliorism he had held with deepening skepticism through most of his fictive career, his travels intimated a cyclical or even a degenerative view of history. The Mediterranean had provoked him as perhaps nothing had done since his reading of Hawthorne and Carlyle during the composition of Moby-Dick. Clarel would become the repository for his mature thinking about history, displaced dramatically to the poem’s characters yet seldom without a measure of authorial investment—in Rolfe’s elegy for lost innocence, for example (‘‘The rank world prospers; but alack! / Eden nor Athens shall come back:— / And what’s become of Arcady?’’ [C 2, 8 : 35–37]), or in Ungar’s scornful comparison of past and present (‘‘the Phidian marbles prove / The graces of the Grecian prime’’ and ‘‘declare / A Magnanimity which our time / Would envy, were it great enough / To comprehend’’ [C 4, 10 : 142– 44, 146– 49]).

Clarel took a decade to write and, as Melville later said and must have known at the time, was ‘‘eminently adapted for unpopularity.’’ 25 More immediately, a volume of ruminative travel sketches like George William Curtis’s ‘‘Howadji’’ books might have seemed the natural vehicle for Melville to shape his impression into ideas and begin to reclaim his literary audience. Having determined, however, that he was ‘‘not going to write any more at present,’’ 26 as his brother-in-law Lemuel Shaw reported in Bartleby-like words, Melville decided to try his fortunes as a popular lecturer and began casting about for what he sardonically described to Curtis as ‘‘a good, earnest subject: Daily progress of man toward a state of intellectual and moral perfection, as evidenced in the history of 5th Avenue & 5 Points’’ (Corr, 314)—‘‘5 points’’ being a notorious New York slum. ‘‘Progress’’ is indeed the subtext of ‘‘Statues in Rome,’’ delivered ‘‘between November of 1857 and February of 1858 . . . in sixteen cities and towns’’ 27 as Melville set out to sift the various metanarratives of history—progressive, cyclical, and declensional—that had begun to compete for dominance in his mind. The Vatican and Capitoline museums had impressed him not merely as storehouses for the treasures of the past but as time capsules through which one might imaginatively reenter the life of former civilizations and weigh it against the life of one’s own. As a record of ‘‘ancient personages’’ (PT, 400), the busts of emperors, statesmen, and philosophers showed the permanence of ‘‘the component parts of human character’’ (PT, 402) and the continuity of human types; Julius Caesar, for example, resembled a railroad magnate or other modern-day corporate president (PT, 401). ‘‘And yet,’’ Melville adds, ‘‘there was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life’’ (PT, 402). Secular pride, a virtue before it was ‘‘swallowed . . . up’’ in the ‘‘humility’’ of Christian times, contributed largely to this ‘‘natural majesty’’ (PT, 402), but so did the Romans’ forthrightness and philosophical cast of mind: ‘‘It was not at all unusual for them at their feasts to talk about the subject of death and other like mournful themes forbidden to modern ears at such scenes. Such topics were not considered irrelevant to the occasions’’ but ‘‘rather added to it a temperate zest’’ (PT, 407). In ‘‘The Age of the Antonines’’ Melville would celebrate such Romans and contrast them to the philosophical and political palterers of his own time: ‘‘We sham, we shuffle while faith declines— / They were frank in the Age of the Antonines’’ (lines 19–20, Poems). Melville’s contempt for American public life had ample grounds, but what fueled his vision of a past where ‘‘fellowly’’ lawgivers ‘‘reasoned of fate at the flowing feast / Nor stifled the fluent thought’’

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(lines 12, 17–18) was the union of earnestness and geniality he recalled from evenings with Hawthorne and Evert Duyckinck but otherwise found so rarely among his contemporaries, East or West. On some level Melville understood that his ancient ‘‘Rome’’ was an idealization, but the ideal, he had come to feel, was always preferable to the actual. Thus, among the classical statues favored by tourists he gave priority to the Apollo Belvedere in Rome over the Venus de Medici in Florence. ‘‘In the Venus the ideal and actual are blended,’’ he argued in ‘‘Statues in Rome,’’ ‘‘yet only representing nature in her perfection, a fair woman startled by some intrusion when leaving the bath’’ (PT, 403); in his journal he was more critical: ‘‘Not pleased with the Venus de Medici’’ ( J, 115). Unlike the Venus, which was ‘‘of the earth,’’ the Apollo was ‘‘divine’’ (PT, 403); it appealed to ‘‘that class of human aspirations of beauty and perfection that, according to Faith, cannot be truly gratified except in another world’’ (PT, 402). Viewing the statues a year later, Hawthorne had similar reactions but put an altogether different valuation upon them: The Apollo was ‘‘ethereal and godlike’’ but too supernal to be apprehended steadily, whereas the earthliness of the Venus evoked ‘‘tenderness’’ and ‘‘affection’’ as if she were ‘‘all womankind in one.’’ 28 It is odd that the man whom Melville described as ‘‘need[ing] roast-beef, done rare’’ (Corr, 181) should have shown a far livelier appreciation of the unaffectedly natural. Melville’s aesthetic idealism resembles Schiller’s in Poems and Ballads, which Melville acquired in 1849 and which, according to Shirley M. Dettlaff, held that ‘‘art allows the mind to soar beyond the natural world to catch a glimpse of an ideal, a perfect one,’’ in whose presence it feels ‘‘a sense of joy and well-being.’’ 29 Such a position was uncharacteristic of Melville, up until now, and it is a measure of his disenchantment with his countrymen, with modernity, and with all present or prospective beliefs that for a time in the late 1850s he should have embraced it as virtually the only refuge available to him. That Melville was indeed thinking historically becomes apparent when, with the Laocoo¨n in mind, he attributes ‘‘the ideal statuary of Rome’’ to ‘‘the doubt and the dark groping of speculation in that age when the old mythology was passing away and men’s minds had not yet reposed in the new faith’’ (PT, 403– 4). In Clarel Rolfe would describe the latter days of the Roman republic as an age ‘‘much like ours: doubt ran, / Faith flagged’’ (C 1, 31: 237–38), as if history were a cycle of epochs of belief and epochs of skepticism. In ‘‘the sculpted monuments of the early Christians’’ Melville finds evidence of the renovating effect of belief, but the joy of the founders has not extended through history, as witnessed by ‘‘the somber mementoes of modern times’’ (PT, 405).

Even before he read Matthew Arnold in the early 1860s, Melville felt himself and his contemporaries ‘‘Wandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be born,’’ 30 and had inklings of the sweeping two-thousand-year historicism through which Arnold would configure Western civilization in ‘‘Obermann Once More.’’ The question Melville would ask in Clarel and was visibly beginning to frame in 1857 in response to his travels was whether the present age of doubt was an interregnum or a finale—and if the latter, ‘‘what shapeless birth’’ (the words are Melville’s own, not Yeats’s or Henry Adams’s [C 3, 5 : 81]) would replace Jesus on the cross as the focus of human energies. In ‘‘Statues in Rome’’ the shapeless birth is materialistic science— the Washington Patent Office as the ‘‘index’’ of the modern world as the Vatican Museum ‘‘is the index of the ancient’’ (PT, 408). Juxtaposed in a single sentence as Adams’s ‘‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’’ would be in a single chapter,31 the museum and the Patent Office become points on a continuum running from Pericles’ Athens to Buchanan’s America and testifying to the direction (or directionlessness) of history. ‘‘The world has taken a practical turn, and we boast much of our progress, of our energy, of our scientific achievements,’’ Melville writes toward the close of the lecture: ‘‘Do all our modern triumphs equal those of the heroes and divinities that stand there silent, the incarnation of grandeur and of beauty?’’ (PT, 408). Reluctant to openly play the Juvenalian satirist (he cites Juvenal, against Dickens, as an example of past magnitude and present diminution [PT, 408– 9]), Melville develops his argument through rhetorical questions. It will be left for Ungar in Clarel to sketch the full horror of the portending ‘‘Dark Ages of Democracy’’ (C 4, 21: 139): . . . Sequel may ensue, Indeed, whose germs one now may view: Myriads playing pygmy parts— Debased into equality: In glut of all material arts A civic barbarism may be: Man disennobled—brutalized By popular science—Atheized Into a smatterer—— (C 4, 21, 125–33)

If ‘‘Statues in Rome’’ is ‘‘the product of a mind grown alien to midcentury America,’’ 32 it also reflects Melville’s conflation of his personal sense of obsolescence (at age thirty-eight) with the evidence of decline

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he saw throughout the Mediterranean. The possibilities for a dignified private and civic life seemed everywhere to be contracting, and like authors before him similarly faced with the betrayals of history and the vicissitudes of a literary career, Melville retreated, temporarily, from the public world and relocated the ideal inwardly. By closing his lecture with Byron’s lines from ‘‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’’—‘‘While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; / When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; / And when Rome falls, the world’’ (PT, 409; Byron, ‘‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,’’ 4, 145:1–3)—he invoked a monument at once synonymous with Roman aesthetic achievement and notorious as a site of organized brutality. He was not eulogizing institutional Greece and Rome so much as he was celebrating ‘‘the dreamers and idealists of old’’ (PT, 408) who looked beyond the barbarities of even the noblest times to an elevation of being unsusceptible of embodiment in any political state. Melville’s ‘‘Rome,’’ that is, was preeminently a city of the mind. ‘‘Governments have changed,’’ he wrote, ‘‘empires have fallen; nations have passed away; but these mute marbles remain. . . . Can art, not life, make the ideal?’’ (PT, 408). Melville would largely outgrow his stance of aesthetic withdrawal as the Civil War recalled him to history and the possibilities for contemporary heroism, not least the heroism of the national bard shaping the meaning of events even as he commemorated them. What he needed most to sustain him in 1857 was a usable sense of ‘‘the connecting link of centuries’’ (PT, 399) that recontextualized America and helped to measure and explain its failures and thereby to account for his own. In this respect ‘‘Statues in Rome’’ served as a transitional private ideology. The ironic fact is that it was also a marketplace performance. As a speaker, Melville was expected to please his audience, yet the premise of his talk was that modern life and taste were hopelessly degraded and that the justification of art (lectures included) was fidelity to a higher ideal. It is scarcely surprising that Melville’s enterprise should have failed. Although most newspaper accounts commended ‘‘Statues in Rome’’ as a literary effort, they found it ill-adapted for a popular audience used to more contemporary themes and more dramatic performances. Melville was bookish, it was said, and spoke in a ‘‘subdued tone’’ and with a ‘‘general want of animation.’’ 33 In delivering such a lecture in such a style in places like Auburn, New York; Chillicothe, Ohio; and Clarksville, Tennessee, Melville seems almost to have been courting rejection, not so much from defiance or a will to failure as from a desire to exemplify, for himself and others, a standard of intellectual seriousness and an undemonstrative dignity he must have known would meet with

indifference. The demeanor audiences found so unsatisfying in Melville was precisely the one he admired in Roman statuary: ‘‘A tranquil, subdued air such as men have when under the influence of no passion’’ (PT, 407). The reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer paid grudging tribute to this stance when he remarked that Melville’s delivery, though ‘‘monotonous and often indistinct,’’ was ‘‘not devoid of impressiveness, which sometimes approached the ministerially solemn.’’ 34 Beyond the lecture platform Melville was hard-pressed to maintain his stoic reserve. Although his travels had the immediate effect of improving his spirits along with his health, the decade between his return from the Mediterranean and the death of his son Malcolm in 1867 was the most difficult in his life. Visiting him in Pittsfield in 1859, Williams College student John Gulick found him ‘‘a disappointed man, soured by criticism and disgusted with the civilized world and with our Christendom in general and in particular. The ancient dignity of Homeric times afforded the only state of humanity, individual or social, to which he could turn with any complacency.’’ 35 Gulick seems almost to be describing ‘‘Statues in Rome,’’ although neither he nor Melville could have imagined how the contempt for modernity inscribed in that lecture would develop, through the combined influences of the Civil War, Melville’s reading, and the mellowing effects of family tragedy and age, into a ruminative historicism that distinguishes Clarel from Moby-Dick and makes the later Melville a deeper, more inclusive writer than the novelist of mid-century. Melville’s irascibility should never be forgotten in considering these years, if only because others were made to suffer for it. But neither should one forget what Melville, describing the Laocoo¨n, called the ‘‘semblance of a great and powerful man writhing with the inevitable destiny which he cannot throw off’’ (PT, 403). It may well have been with an image of himself in mind that Melville scored the lines on the Laocoo¨n from Schiller’s poem ‘‘The Ideal and the Actual Life’’: ‘‘Here, suffering’s self is made divine, and shows / The brave resolve of the firm soul alone.’’ 36 One wonders with what ‘‘shock of recognition’’ (PT, 249) he might have read Hawthorne’s words on the Laocoo¨n, written in March 1858, a month after Melville’s final delivery of ‘‘Statues in Rome’’: ‘‘The Laocoo¨n, on this visit, impressed me not less than before; there was such a type of human beings struggling with an inexplicable trouble, and entangled in a complication which they can never free themselves from by their own efforts, and out of which Heaven will not help them.’’ 37 The agony Hawthorne finds in the physical sufferings of the Laocoo¨n recalls the agony he ascribed to Melville in his metaphysical sufferings. It is Melville’s distinction that, with time, he learned to live

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in the coils that threatened to strangle him and, in the Mediterraneaninspired Clarel, came to fashion a quiet but monumental art—a Roman art, as he would have understood it— out of what in 1856–1857 was still a cry of pain.

notes

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This essay is a revised version of ‘‘An Arch Between Two Lives: Melville in the Mediterranean, 1856–57,’’ Arizona Quarterly 55 (1999): 21– 47. 1. The Writings of Herman Melville. Journals, series ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1989), 7. Hereafter cited in the text as J. 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks, ed. Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), 170. Hereafter cited in the text as EN. 3. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville as Lecturer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), 111. 4. Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, Melville’s Orienda (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), 3. 5. Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Packard, 1947). Hereafter cited as Poems. 6. Twenty years later Mark Twain wrote of Constantinople in a similar vein: ‘‘Every where was dirt, and dust, and dinginess, and gloom; every where were signs of a hoary antiquity, but with nothing touching or beautiful about it.’’ The Innocents Abroad (New York: Library of America, 1984), 287. 7. See George William Curtis, Nile Notes of a Howadji (New York: Harpers, 1852), 50 –52. 8. Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 128. 9. See Angela Miller, ‘‘Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory,’’ Prospects, vol. 14 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 65– 66. 10. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 68. 11. Miller, ‘‘Thomas Cole,’’ 77. 12. ‘‘Statues in Rome,’’ in The Writings of Herman Melville. The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 130. Hereafter this volume will be cited in the text as PT. 13. Melville, ‘‘Naples in the Time of Bomba,’’ in ‘‘At the Hostelry’’ and ‘‘Naples in the Time of Bomba,’’ ed. Gordon Poole (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1989), lines 150, 153–56.

14. The Writings of Herman Melville. Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 226. Herafter cited in the text as MD. 15. The Writings of Herman Melville. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1991), 1 line 31: 36–38. Hereafter cited in the text as C. 16. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 486. 17. Franklin Walker, Irreverent Pilgrims (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 28. 18. J. Ross Browne, Yusef (New York: Harpers, 1855), 360. 19. Twain, Innocents Abroad, 486. 20. Charles Dudley Warner, In the Levant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1876), 221. 21. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane, 1950), 253, 254. 22. See Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Volume I, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 23. Curtis, Nile Notes, 218, 64. 24. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks, ed. Thomas Woodson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 295– 96. 25. The Writings of Herman Melville. Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 483. Hereafter cited as Corr. 26. Quoted in Eleanor Melville Metcalf, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 165. 27. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., ‘‘Historical Note,’’ in PT, 517. 28. Hawthorne, French and Italian Notebooks, 125, 298. 29. Shirley M. Dettlaff, ‘‘Ionian Form and Esau’s Waste: Melville’s View of Art in Clarel,’’ American Literature 54 (1982): 214. 30. ‘‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,’’ in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), lines 85–86. 31. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), chapter 25. 32. Merton M. Sealts, Jr., ‘‘Melville as Lecturer,’’ in Pursuing Melville (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 64. 33. Anonymous review, Cleveland Daily Herald, quoted in Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 589. 34. Leyda, The Melville Log, 591. 35. Ibid., 605. 36. In Dettlaff, ‘‘Ionian Form,’’ 226. 37. Hawthorne, French and Italian Notebooks, 138.

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road to africa frederick douglass’s rome

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Frederick Douglass visited Rome in 1887 and described his sojourn in the concluding section of his 1892 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, which is an expanded version of his 1881 memoir of the same name. Typically, nineteenth-century American travelers to Rome were drawn to the art and history of the city, and even to aspects of Roman Catholicism, while at the same time they recoiled from what they perceived as the decadence, agedness, and duplicity of Protestant culture’s traditionally seductive antirepublican enemy.1 Much of what Douglass has to say about Rome in Life and Times suggests his familiarity with other travel writings of the period and his desire to present himself, in part, as the archetypal conflicted American traveler. Although he suffers an initial disappointment when arriving in newer areas of Rome, which remind him of ‘‘Paris, London, or New York,’’ by the next day Rome has become ‘‘Rome’’: ‘‘The Eternal City, seated on its throne of seven hills, fully gave us all it had promised, banished every feeling of disappointment, and filled our minds with everincreasing wonder and amazement.’’ 2 He praises Rome’s art and architecture, which he says reveal an aesthetics and history lacking in the United States, and he seems envious of the ways in which the rituals and practices of Roman Catholicism bring ‘‘a great comfort to these people’’ (LT, 577). But even as he confesses his attraction to the city’s spiritual grandeur, he voices skepticism and concern about the possibly mendacious, despotic, and aristocratic character of the Roman Catholic Church. Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was also attracted to aspects of Roman Catholic art and religion, he worries over the sheer worldliness of the Church as economic and imperial institution. Declaring that ‘‘[a]bout every fifth man met with . . . is at work in some way to

maintain [the Church’s] power, ascendency, and glory,’’ he wryly notes that ‘‘[r]eligion seems to be in Rome the chief business by which men live’’ and he condemns the ‘‘fanaticism . . . encouraged by a church so worldly-wise as that of Rome’’ (LT, 575). The doubleness of his response, critique and fascination, is nicely captured in his remarks on St Peter’s. Commenting on ‘‘the wealth and grandeur within,’’ Douglass points out that ‘‘the Church of Rome today receives gifts from all the Christian world, our own republican country included.’’ Yet despite his portrayal of the Church as a money power, Douglass finds himself succumbing to the atmosphere of ‘‘ethereal glory’’ at St. Peter’s, and he concludes his remarks on a note of begrudging admiration: ‘‘St. Peter’s, by its vastness, wealth, splendor, and architectural perfections, acts upon us like some great and overpowering natural wonder. It awes us into silent, speechless admiration’’ (LT, 576). Rome is both unnatural and natural, subject to critique and yet somehow beyond critique. It offers a kind of solace ultimately unavailable in Protestant-republican America. Although Douglass’s conflicted responses to Rome can make him seem very much the conventional nineteenth-century American traveler, I will be focusing here on some of the less conventional aspects of his presentation of Rome in Life and Times and other, more private writings of the period: the way in which he uses Rome to address what he regards as the conjoined issues of race and progress in the United States, and the way in which he conceives of Rome in relation to Africa. But first it would be useful to provide some background on his travels. From October 1886 to May 1887 Douglass toured England, France, Italy, Egypt, and Greece with his second wife, ne´e Helen Pitts, a white woman whom he had married two years earlier, in 1884, at the age of sixty-six, less than two years after the death of his first wife, Anna. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Helen worked as Douglass’s secretary when he was Recorder of Deeds in Washington in the early 1880s, and their marriage was greeted with considerable controversy: Douglass was attacked by blacks and whites (including Helen’s family) for marrying someone outside of his ‘‘race.’’ In response to these criticisms, Douglass aggressively challenged essentialist notions of racial difference, asserting, for example, in an interview printed in the Washington Post on January 26, 1884: ‘‘I am not an African, as may be seen from my features and hair, and it is equally easy to discern that I am not a Caucasian.’’ 3 Consistent with his statements on the matter since the 1840s, he argued for the importance of transcending race, of thinking about the oneness of humanity, declaring in the same interview (sounding a bit like Melville’s Ishmael on Queequeg’s religious denomination):

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‘‘You may say that Frederick Douglass considers himself a member of the one race which exists’’ (Papers, 5 : 147).4 Throughout his career, Douglass’s inclusive views led him to reject black separatist solutions to the racial problems plaguing the United States, fearing that emigration movements would undermine his efforts to champion African Americans’ rights to U.S. citizenship. As he remarked in the January 1859 Douglass’ Monthly: ‘‘Now, and always, we expect to insist upon it that we are Americans; that America is our native land; that this is our home; that we are American citizens; that it is our highest wisdom thus to recognize ourselves; and that it is the duty of the American people so to recognize us.’’ 5 Consistent with his desires to bring about black elevation in the United States, he attacked black racial chauvinism, or what he scornfully referred to as ‘‘race pride,’’ as a ‘‘positive evil,’’ warning in an 1889 speech to an African American audience that racial chauvinism replicated the thinking of white racists and thus gave ‘‘the enemy a stick to break our own heads’’ (Papers, 5 : 411, 412). As a mulatto, he also regarded racial chauvinism as false to social and biological realities. In the same speech, ‘‘The Nation’s Problem,’’ he thus challenged those who would chide him and other African Americans for a lack of ‘‘race pride’’: ‘‘When a colored man is charged with a want of race pride, he may well ask, What race? For a large percentage of the colored race are related in some degree to more than one race’’ (Papers, 5 : 413). But even as he urged blacks to abandon race pride and fight for their rights in the United States, he remained acutely aware that most whites thought in terms of racial binaries and hierarchies and that such thinking had hurtful daily consequences for African Americans. In a letter of July 16, 1886, to his friend W. H. Thomas, he succinctly noted: ‘‘The Negro is few, the white man is many. The Negro is weak, the white man is strong.’’ 6 Although his public rhetoric often remained optimistic about blacks’ prospects in the United States, the fact of the matter is that with the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow laws and antimiscegenation statutes, Douglass began to wonder just how better off the nominally free blacks really were. He despairingly wrote Francis J. Grimke´ on April 24, 1886: ‘‘Though no longer bought and sold in the market we are still a proscribed, oppressed and maltreated race at nearly all points.’’ Given this social reality, Douglass confided to Grimke´ that there was a continued need for race leaders (even as he disavowed notions of race): ‘‘It seems to me that the colored man has now almost as much need of a faithful advocate as in the time of slavery’’ (LW, 4 : 442). Central to Douglass’s project as a race leader during the 1880s and

early 1890s, Gregory Stephens argues, was an effort to display his interracial marriage as a mediatory symbol that spoke to the possibilities of overcoming racial obsessions and hatreds.7 Presenting his marriage and mixed-race status as positive examples for the nation, Douglass championed the value of a racial mixing that ultimately could contribute to the nation’s progress and harmony by making a virtue of the nation’s racial diversity. Concerned that white racists increasingly sought to demonize black men as desirous of ‘‘unnatural’’ sexual and marital relations with white women, he extolled what he termed America’s ‘‘Composite Nationality,’’ its mixture of ‘‘white’’ and ‘‘black’’ blood, and presented himself (and his marriage) as the very embodiment of such mixture.8 In this way he boldly sought to confront those who, for whatever reason, continued to put stock in racial essentialisms. As part of his effort to undermine such essentialisms, he cagily begins the section added to the 1892 Life and Times by listing the various questions he is regularly asked about the interconnected issues of his racial status and marriage: In what proportion does the blood of the various races mingle in my veins, especially how much white blood and how much black blood entered in my composition? . . . Whether I considered myself more African than Caucasian, or the reverse? Whether I derived my intelligence from my father, or from my mother, from my white, or from my black blood? Whether persons of mixed blood are as strong and healthy as persons of either of the races whose blood they inherit? . . . Why did I marry a person of my father’s complexion instead of marrying one of my mother’s complexion? How is the race problem to be solved in this country? (LT, 513)

The large implication of this rhetorical opening is that Americans will be on the path to addressing their race problems only when they come to realize the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of such questions. But even as he celebrated the possibilities (and reality) of biraciality and multiraciality, Douglass sought to present his politics of racial mixing to his black readers as anything but a program that would encourage them to succumb or surrender to whiteness. Like the African American writer William Wells Brown, who in his 1881 My Southern Home urged blacks to increase their ‘‘contact with educated and enterprising whites’’ because ‘‘amalgamation is the great civilizer of the races of men,’’ Douglass argued that blacks’ commitment to racial mixing should proceed not from a sense of racial inferiority but rather from a prideful conviction of racial equality.9

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It follows, then, that one of Douglass’s principal motives for touring Europe was to cast himself, the black traveler, in the role of the civilized and elite traveler of the period. Richard Brodhead has argued that during the Gilded Age European tourism became one of the gentry class’s ‘‘chief means to establish its place in the world’’ by promoting ‘‘the value of Culture.’’ 10 In deciding to undertake his own grand tour, Douglass as representative black leader hoped to make his and, by extension, African Americans’ claims to the world of culture, even as he remained acutely aware that struggles for literacy and economic survival remained the pressing issues for the majority of blacks in the United States. In less grandiose ways, Douglass’s tour was also no doubt motivated by a desire to escape the controversy over his marriage and by the fact that earlier in the year President Grover Cleveland had asked him to resign from his job as Recorder of Deeds. Additional motives for the tour became clearer to Douglass only after he arrived in England, for it was at that time that he decided to add Rome and Egypt to his itinerary.11 The evidence suggests that Douglass initially intended to use his visit to Egypt as a kind of fact-finding expedition that would help him to argue, along with Martin Delany and many other nineteenth-century black leaders, that Western civilization had important sources in Africa and thus that those of African descent had legitimate claims to what Douglass in a letter to his son Lewis Douglass referred to as ‘‘the moral support of Ancient Greatness.’’ 12 As he somewhat vaguely writes in Life and Times, ‘‘I had . . . an ethnological purpose in the pursuit of which I hope[d] to turn my visit to some account in combating American prejudice against the darker colored races of mankind, and at the same time to raise colored people somewhat in their own estimation and thus stimulate them to higher endeavors’’ (LT, 579). Rather than presenting all roads leading to Rome, Douglass, in an effort both to develop black pride and to contest the ideological sources of whites’ antiblack racism, would show that all roads led to Africa. But such was his commitment to ideals of progress and racial mixing that he resisted what could be termed an Afrocentric celebration of origins and in Life and Times presents instead a more progressive narrative of all roads leading both to and from Africa. As we shall see, it is ultimately in Rome that Douglass finds what he most values and believes will be most useful in making his antiracist arguments in the United States: a conjunction of mixed-blood peoples (the Romans) and the rise of Western civilization. Douglass and his wife began their tour in England in late September of 1886, stopping first at Liverpool and then making their way to London, where they met Anna and Ellen Richardson, the British sisters who

had helped to purchase Douglass from slavery in 1846 for $711, and Julia Griffiths Crofts, the now-widowed white woman who had been Douglass’s editor (and possible paramour) during the early 1850s.13 In October the Douglasses traveled to Paris, where they remained for eleven weeks, touring the city with, among others, Theodore Tilton, who had left the United States in 1883 after his scandalous conflict with Henry Ward Beecher, and Theodore Stanton, the son of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. During their stay Douglass and his wife visited a number of people and landmarks that spoke to Douglass’s interest in slavery and race: Haitian students from the French colonies whose intelligence and sophistication, Douglass wrote to a friend, testified to ‘‘the possibilities of the colored race’’ (LW, 4 : 446); a statue honoring Alphonse Marie Louis de Lamartine; and Gustave Dore´’s statue of the mixed-race writer Alexandre Dumas. According to Stanton, who published an account of his Parisian tours with the Douglasses in the journal Open Court, when Douglass viewed the statue of Lamartine, he dwelt ‘‘on the fact that the poet-President signed in 1848 the decrees that freed all the slaves of the French colonies, and his eyes were attracted by the resemblance of Lamartine’s face to that of Lincoln’’; and when he viewed the statue of Dumas he was unmoved, for he ‘‘remembered how this son of a negress had never spoken a word or written a line in defense of his mother’s race.’’ 14 Douglass’s responses suggest that despite his commitment to racial unity, he continued to conceive of himself as a race leader who had a mission to defend ‘‘his mother’s race.’’ In fact, while in Paris he wrote to friends that he intended to put his travels to use in helping blacks in the United States: ‘‘I shall probably make a few speeches . . . in vindication of the cause and character of the colored race in America, in which I hope to do justice to their progress and make known some of the difficulties with which as a people they have had to contend’’ (LW, 4 : 446).15 Although Paris clearly stimulated Douglass’s thinking on racial matters and was the locale of his longest stay, in Life and Times, his most public account of his travels, he devotes relatively little attention to it, focusing instead on Rome and Egypt. He sets up the significance of his journey from Paris to Rome in terms of issues of race and civilization, referring to ‘‘the country lying between Paris and Rome’’ as ‘‘the cradle in which the civilization of Western Europe and our own country was rocked and developed’’ (LT, 562) and describing the necessity of traveling even farther east to study its birth. In making this journey, he states, the traveler moves on a continuum from nations exhibiting relative whiteness to nations exhibiting relative blackness, with the implication being that there is no essential purity of races (particularly of

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whiteness). In a passage that is crucial to an understanding of Douglass’s conception of race in human history, he writes about the journey from Paris to Rome as a journey toward ‘‘blackness’’: ‘‘As the traveler moves eastward and southward between those two great cities, he will observe an increase of black hair, black eyes, full lips, and dark complexions. He will observe a southern and eastern style of dress, gay colors, startling jewelry, and an outdoor free-and-easy movement of the people’’ (LT, 562). He presents these physical characteristics and signs of racial gradation as consistent with his ‘‘ethnological’’ project of using his eastward journey to develop arguments about the indebtedness of relatively white Western Europe to relatively black Northern Africa, and in this way argue for human equality and unity. For example, he notes that like blacks in Egypt (and the American South), workers in France and Italy congregate together at night and carry their supplies on their heads. This provides evidence, he says, that refutes notions of ‘‘inferiority peculiar to the Negro’’ (LT, 562), showing that ‘‘[e]ven if originated by the Negro,’’ various cultural practices have ‘‘been well copied by some of the best types of the Caucasian. In any case, it may be welcomed as a proof of a common brotherhood’’ (LT, 563). Douglass of course had long been thinking about race and cultural origins, and in one of his best-known antebellum lectures, ‘‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,’’ a graduation speech delivered in 1854 before the Philozetian and Phi Delta literary societies of Western Reserve College in Hudson, Ohio, he had sought to counter the racist, polygenist arguments of the leading exponents of the socalled ‘‘American School’’ of ethnology—Josiah Nott, Samuel Morton, George Gliddon, and others—who had made avowedly scientific claims about the racial and cultural inferiority, separate evolution, and absolute difference of black peoples in relation to whites. Intent on demonstrating that Egypt’s contributions to Western civilization had everything to do with the white blood of its inhabitants, Samuel Morton, for example, in his influential Crania Ægyptiaca (1844), asserted that the ‘‘Valley of the Nile, both in Egypt and Nubia, was originally peopled by a branch of the Caucasian race.’’ 16 In ‘‘Claims,’’ Douglass attacked Morton for trying ‘‘to prove that the ancient Egyptians were totally distinct from the negroes, and to deny all relationship between,’’ and he argued instead for ‘‘a near relationship between the present enslaved and degraded negroes, and the ancient highly civilized and wonderfully endowed Egyptians’’ (Papers, 2 : 508, 517). Convinced that the scientific racialism of the American School’s ethnologists was being put to the service of legitimating racial hierarchies in the United States, Douglass proclaimed that ‘‘the whole argument in defence of slavery, becomes utterly worth-

less the moment the African is proved to be equally a man with the Anglo-Saxon’’ (Papers, 2 : 506).17 In Life and Times, Douglass to some extent is still fighting the battle against scientific racialism, for the good reason that such racialist thinking continued to hold considerable sway in U.S. culture. He remains concerned that ‘‘scientific’’ assertions of black inferiority serve as crucial underpinnings to ‘‘the steady march of the slave power toward national supremacy since the agonies of the war’’ (LT, 554), and he includes a discussion of his 1854 criticisms of Morton, Nott, and Gliddon in both the 1881 and 1892 versions of his autobiography. But the emphasis in Douglass’s 1892 autobiography is ultimately less on locating and celebrating the black sources of Western civilization than on exploring the multiracial origins and development of the West. Given his commitment to African Americans’ rights to U.S. citizenship, which he saw as best brought about by a collapsing of racial categories and hierarchies, and given the symbolic place of his marriage in this social and political program, it is thus not surprising that in his 1892 Life and Times he seeks to emphasize the mixed-raced identities of the European and, by extension, the manifestly white and black American peoples, presenting mixture rather than purity as the crucial determinants of civilization and progress. In this regard it is significant that when Douglass sailed to Europe on the aptly named City of Rome, he spent a full day reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s English Traits (1856). (According to his ‘‘Diary, 1886–1894,’’ Douglass was able to devote himself to Emerson on September 20, 1886, because his wife was confined to their cabin with seasickness.18 ) In the chapter in English Traits titled ‘‘Race,’’ Emerson challenged the central tenets of the Scottish physician Robert Knox’s 1850 book The Races of Man: A Fragment, which tried to prove, in Emerson’s words, ‘‘that races are imperishable.’’ 19 Refuting Knox, Emerson maintains that the idea of a pure or unchanging race is a fiction, for the progress of Western civilization, he declares, ‘‘eats away the old [racial] traits’’ (English Traits, 48). Especially gratifying to Douglass would have been Emerson’s remarks on racial gradation and mixture. Emerson writes: ‘‘Though we flatter the self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races, all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of races, and strange resemblances meet us everywhere’’ (English Traits, 49–50). Even the English, he says, have a ‘‘composite character [that] betrays a mixed origin’’ (English Traits, 50). Significantly, in contemplating English racial types, Emerson notes that ‘‘the Roman has implanted his dark complexion’’ (English Traits, 54). It is precisely such intermixture, such ‘‘composite character,’’ Emerson concludes, that contributed to

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England’s emergence as one of the world’s great civilizations and powers. In his diary entry on Emerson, Douglass remarks, ‘‘I . . . have been glad to find my own views of the civilization of England supported by one so thoughtful and able as the Sage of Concord’’ (September 20, 1886). Emerson’s discussion of the darkness of the Romans, and the overall mixed racial character of Europe, no doubt influenced Douglass’s own account, approximately forty years later, of Rome’s racial dynamics. For it is in Europe’s Rome, as much as in Africa’s Egypt, that Douglass takes note of racial mixture and blackness. Douglass made an initial two-week visit to Rome, arriving on January 19, 1887, and soon after meeting up with the small black expatriate community that found Rome a congenial political and aesthetic refuge from a racist United States. This group included the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who had been living in Rome for the previous twenty years, and Sarah Remond, an abolitionist who was the sister of Douglass’s close friend Charles Remond, the abolitionist lecturer. In the enthusiastic spirit of these Rome-enamored expatriates, Douglass in Life and Times focuses much of his attention on describing his fascination with the relics of ancient Rome and the practices of the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. But he also talks about racial and cultural difference. Contemplating the Arch of Titus, he laments the fate of the Jews in losing their ‘‘beloved Jerusalem,’’ and he suggests that his ability to sympathize with the Jews has much to do with the fact that as an African American he has suffered similar indignities based on racial prejudice: ‘‘None who have never suffered a like scorn can adequately feel for their humiliation’’ (LT, 573). He then moves from a lament for the Jews’ sufferings to a discussion of the holiness and bravery of St. Paul and St. Peter, and this discussion culminates in a playfully arch and subversive image of worshippers paying their respects to the ‘‘black’’ statue of St. Peter at St. Peter’s: ‘‘I had some curiosity in seeing devout people going up to the black statue of St. Peter—I was glad to find him black, I have no prejudice against his color—and kissing the old fellow’s big toe, one side of which has been nearly worn away by these devout and tender salutes of which it has been the cold subject’’ (LT, 577).20 The joke here of course is that the bronze of the statue has blackened to such an extent that Douglass can present a picture of St. Peter and his worshippers that inverts conventional images of white supremacy. In the context of the rise of public lynchings of blacks during the 1880s in the United States, there may even be an oblique phallic joke in the image of whites kissing the saint’s extended black toe. But more is going on in the passage than just a comic (and bawdy) racial inversion. Con-

sistent with his conception of the Continent as becoming blacker as the traveler moves east, the image of a black St. Peter that Douglass presents in Life and Times speaks to his effort to ‘‘blacken’’ traditional accounts of European and Christian history by questioning assumptions of whiteness. When he worked up the account in the late 1880s or early 1890s for Life and Times, Douglass was clearly mounting a pointed and deliberate challenge by choosing to raise such questions through his image of a black St. Peter, for the fact is that his initial diary entry on the statue makes no mention of St. Peter’s ‘‘blackness.’’ Instead, he matterof-factly describes the ‘‘men and women . . . crossing themselves, and some kissing the toe of St. Peter, which toe has already been nearly kissed away’’ ( June 24, 1887). Douglass’s reconception of St. Peter as black can therefore be taken as central to his effort to interrogate and revise key ideological sources of whites’ ‘‘race pride.’’ With his emphasis on Roman blackness, Douglass would seem to have set his sights on the racist historicism of Thomas Jefferson, whose influential discussion of slavery in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia has at its center a discussion of Roman ‘‘whiteness.’’ Attempting to cast a positive light on slavery in the emergent United States, Jefferson insisted that the condition of the Romans’ slaves ‘‘was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America,’’ in large part because the Romans’ laws governing slavery were significantly harsher than those of U.S. slave owners. And yet, Jefferson concedes, after denigrating the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, the fact is that in Rome, as opposed to the United States, the ‘‘slaves were often the rarest of artists.’’ 21 According to Jefferson, the obvious reason for this disparity is racial: ‘‘Epictetus, Terence, and Phædrus, were slaves. But they were of the race of whites. It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction’’ (Notes, 268). Convinced, as he puts it, ‘‘that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,’’ he can thus explain why the Romans, unlike Americans, could emancipate their slaves with greater frequency: Emancipation in ancient Rome would not raise what was for Jefferson the highly troubling specter of racial mixing. As Jefferson explains, ‘‘Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master’’ (Notes, 270). Jefferson’s revulsed rejection of the very possibility of mixture was of course at odds with Douglass’s social goals of the period, as it was at odds as well with Emerson’s (and Douglass’s) views of racial gradation. Jefferson’s views also conflict with the historical truth of the matter. The

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classical scholar Frank M. Snowden, Jr., in his book Blacks in Antiquity, dismisses notions of racial separatism and chauvinism perpetuated by Jefferson and others, arguing that the Romans did in fact enslave, liberate, and mix with African peoples: ‘‘Roman accounts of race mixture between Ethiopians and Mediterranean whites reveal no repugnance at the idea of racial crossings between whites and non-whites.’’ 22 There was no (or less) repugnance because the kinds of hierarchical racial categories that guided the thinking of Jefferson and other Enlightenment writers had not yet been invented; for this reason, then, according to Snowden, Roman society ‘‘had no prohibition against miscegenation.’’ 23 In his romance of miscegenation, The Marble Faun (1860), Hawthorne implicitly works against Jefferson’s notion of Roman purity by telling his own story of racial mixture in describing the descendent of what he refers to as the ‘‘race of Monte Beni’’ as marked by ‘‘constant intermixtures.’’ 24 Although Hawthorne emphasizes the allegorical mixing of animal and human, the allegory is informed by traditional white fears of miscegenation (see, for instance, the linking of animality and race in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ [1841]). Miriam, like Donatello, is also referred to as a person of ‘‘mixed race’’ (MF, 430), as she is rumored to have both black and Jewish blood. In Hawthorne’s (as opposed to Jefferson’s) Rome, so in Douglass’s Rome: There is an emphasis on mixture, although in Douglass the representation of mixture has different ideological sources and is put to very different political uses.25 That said, there are important similarities between Hawthorne’s and Douglass’s notion of the conjunction of Jewish and black blood in those bodies that Jefferson preferred to imagine as racially ‘‘pure.’’ It is thus worth noting that some evangelicals, native American and otherwise, regarded the native Americans as descendants of the lost tribes of Israel and accordingly conceived of both the native Americans and the Jews, whom Douglass presents quite sympathetically in Life and Times, as people of color.26 In his best-known speech, ‘‘An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man’’ (1833), the Pequot writer William Apess works with that notion to present Christ and his disciples as black. Apess writes: Did you ever hear or read of Christ teaching his disciples that they ought to despise one because his skin was different from theirs? Jesus Christ being a Jew, and those of his Apostles certainly were not whites—and did not he who completed the plan of salvation complete it for the whites as well as for the Jews, and others. And were not the whites the most degraded people on the earth at that time? . . . And did

not St. Paul labor more abundantly for building up a Christian nation among you than any of the Apostles? And you know as well as I that you are not indebted to a principle beneath a white skin for your religious services but to a colored one.27

Apess thus concludes his speech with a wry rhetorical question: ‘‘Now, if the Lord Jesus Christ, who is counted by all to be a Jew—and it is well known that the Jews are a colored people, especially those living in the East, where Christ was born—and if he should appear among us, would he not be shut out of doors by many, very quickly?’’ 28 In asking such a question, Apess destabilizes notions of blackness and Christianity (as would Douglass in his attack on proslavery Christians in the appendix to his 1845 Narrative), terming the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of white ‘‘Christian’’ racists as ‘‘ten times blacker than any skin that you will find in the universe.’’ 29 Because St. Paul has traditionally been admired as the saint who best articulated Christ’s transracial view of the oneness of humanity, it is significant that Douglass in Life and Times would describe Paul’s brave walking of the Appian Way to meet his fate. But it is with his description of St. Peter’s blackness that Douglass, in the tradition of Apess (and Hawthorne) does his most subversive and ironic questioning of racial purity and superiority. He concludes his account of the Roman Catholic worshippers of the ‘‘black’’ St. Peter by remarking, ‘‘It is doubtless a great comfort to these people, after all, to have kissed the great toe of the black image of the Apostle Peter’’ (LT, 577). Having reinforced the image of a black St. Peter, he then underscores, in an anticipation of the pragmatic, ethnographic mode of William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the psychological and spiritual similarities between whites’ religious practices in Rome and blacks’ religious practices in the United States: ‘‘I felt, in looking upon these religious shows in Rome, as the late Benjamin Wade said he felt at a Negro camp meeting, where there was much howling, shouting, jumping: ‘This is nothing to me, but it surely must be something to them’’’ (LT, 578). This sort of cultural relativistic presentation, linking that which has been viewed as traditionally white with that which has been viewed as traditionally black, while retaining a skeptical distance that means to collapse the distance between white and black, comes to inform Douglass’s subsequent remarks on his travels to Egypt. As his account of Rome suggests, Douglass regarded racial mixing as both a social desideratum and a fact of human history, a fact that could best be studied by moving even farther east. One reason that Douglass insisted upon such a fact is that he wanted to instruct his readers on the

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crucial place of ‘‘blackness’’ in that mix, thereby challenging the central tenets of the ethnologists’ white supremacist Anglo-Saxonism. In Life and Times he remarks that what he hoped to gain by subsequently journeying from Rome to Egypt in February 1887 was evidence to support his ‘‘ethnological’’ vision: ‘‘I had a theory for which I wanted the support of facts in the range of my own knowledge. But more of this in another place’’ (LT, 579). Douglass never does give us a major statement on ethnology in some other place, but we can speculate that he planned to revisit the main arguments of his 1854 ‘‘The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Understood’’ by collecting the empirical facts that would support his thesis, as elaborated in ‘‘Claims,’’ that ‘‘Greece and Rome—and through them Europe and America—have received their civilization from the ancient Egyptians,’’ and that the Egyptians ‘‘were, undoubtedly, just about as dark in complexion as many in this country who are considered genuine negroes’’ (Papers, 2 : 508). In fact, while in Paris he wrote a letter to friends suggesting that because of the intensifying antiblack racism during the 1880s, he believed it was particularly important to continue to fight ethnological battles, for as he remarks in that letter, I have long been interested in Ethnology— especially of the North American races. I have wanted the evidence of greatness under a colored skin to meet and beat back the charge of natural, original and permanent inferiority of the colored races of men. Could I have seen forty years ago what I have now seen I should have been much better fortified to meet the Notts and Gliddons of America in their arguments against the Negro as a part of the great African race. Knowledge of this subject comes to me late, but I hope not too late to be of some service, for the battle at this point is not yet fought out and victory is not yet won.’’ (LW, 4 : 446)

What is somewhat surprising about this letter is that he wrote it before visiting Egypt; he asserts the centrality of ‘‘the great African race’’ to Western culture on the evidence of his prior reading, his viewing of several Haitian students in Paris, and perhaps most importantly, especially when considered in relation to his responsiveness to Rome, his perception of the blackening of Europe as he travels east from England. Consistent with his notion of racial continuum and gradation, by the time Douglass makes his way to Egypt, he believes that he has entered a realm of greater, but not ‘‘pure,’’ blackness. Shortly after arriving in Cairo, he writes in a diary entry of February 18, 1887: ‘‘I do not know of what color and features the ancient Egyptians were, but the great

mass of the people I have yet seen would in America be classed with Negroes. This would not be a scientific description but an American description.’’ In a letter of February 20, 1887, to his son Lewis, Douglass makes a similarly jaundiced point about the unscientific, culturally inflected nature of racial categories in the United States, remarking that the Egyptians ‘‘are very much like the mulatto, and would be taken for such in the United States.’’ 30 Douglass’s thinking on Egypt and race was in all likelihood influenced by David Walker, who in his famous 1829 Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World proclaimed that ‘‘the Egyptians, were Africans or coloured people, such as we are—some of them yellow and others dark—a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt—about the same as you see the coloured people of the present day.’’ 31 Like Douglass, but even more explicitly, Walker asserted a connection between blacks and the ancient Egyptians for the ideological purposes of contesting the racist ideology of Thomas Jefferson. In this regard it should be recalled that as a mulatto Douglass earlier in his career had personally linked himself to Egypt, remarking in the third chapter of his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, that his mother’s features resembled those of an Egyptian head depicted in James Cowles Prichard’s The Natural History of Man (1845), a text that had argued for connections between Egyptians and blacks. (Douglass offers similar comments on Prichard and his mother in the opening chapter of the 1881 and 1892 editions of Life and Times.) From this perspective, and in light of his visiting Egypt approximately thirty years after having asserted this familial connection, Douglass can be regarded as having reached a kind of spiritual homeland in a nation that, although literally in Africa, is figured as a border zone between Western Europe and the southern reaches of even ‘‘blacker’’ Africa. And yet the fact is that, while in Egypt, Douglass can seem rather condescending to the ‘‘blacks’’ or mulattos that he encounters there. In his diary he describes how he ‘‘saw various forms of squalor, disease, and deformity—all manner of importunate beggary. It was truly pitiful to see a people thus grovelling by filth and utter wretchedness’’ (February 19, 1887). As someone who had championed the rights of women since the 1840s, he is also concerned about the situation of Egyptian women. Less than a month before visiting Egypt, he noted in his diary the ‘‘very cheerful, happy—and successful’’ situation in Rome of the black artist Edmonia Lewis ( January 26, 1887). By way of contrast, Egyptian women, he states, are ‘‘kept in ignorance and degraded, having no existence except that of ministering to the pride and lusts of the men who own them as slaves are owned’’ (February 19, 1887). In Life and Times, Douglass adopts a similarly critical perspective on Egypt. Watch-

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ing a ‘‘small army of Arabs’’ working with apparent pleasure on a barge, he notes their happiness at their labors and compares them to blacks, remarking, in passages that make him sound a bit like Melville’s Amasa Delano in ‘‘Benito Cereno,’’ that the ‘‘Negro works best and hardest when it is no longer work, but becomes play with joyous singing’’ (LT, 580). He depicts the laboring Arabs as animal-like: ‘‘Lank in body, slender in limb, full of spirit, they reminded one of blooded horses’’ (LT, 581). Rather than celebrating Egypt, he concludes by underscoring the country’s lack of progress: ‘‘Egypt may have invented the plow, but it has not improved upon the invention’’ (LT, 585). Ultimately, although his intention in visiting Egypt, as stated in letters and diary entries of 1887, was to adduce the kind of evidence that would combat white racists’ denigrations of blacks’ place in Western history, by the time he wrote up the account for his memoir he seems uneasy about what he regarded as an embarrassing lack of evidence of ‘‘progress’’ in this Northern African nation. In this respect, Douglass displayed some of the attendant Western biases of nineteenth-century U.S. elites, white and black, who came into contact with Arabs and Islam and failed to discern marks of civilization. His road to Africa thus ultimately leads him back to Rome, where, from his perspective as Christian, reformer, and former U.S. government official, fuller progress and a subtler racial mixing are on display.32 What Douglass does experience in Egypt is not some chauvinistic insight into the greatness of Africa but stirrings of a nascent religiosity.33 Climbing the Pyramids at the age of sixty-nine with the help of two Arab servants, he describes in Life and Times how he looks down from the summit and feels a sense of spirituality and wonder; he confesses to experiencing ‘‘thoughts and feelings never thought and felt before’’ (LT, 586). And he experiences once again a cultural relativistic, or perhaps more accurately, pragmatist view of the ways in which religion speaks to suprarational human needs: ‘‘The religion and church of Egypt, though denounced as a fraud and their author branded throughout Christendom as an imposter, are not less believed in and followed in Egypt than the Church and Christianity are believed in and followed at Rome. . . . If Rome has its unwashed monks, Cairo has its howling and dancing dervishes, and both seem equally deaf to the dictates of reason’’ (LT, 586–87). Despite such cultural-relativistic insights, however, upon his return to Rome, where he decides to remain for another two weeks, Douglass evinces a great deal of respect for Roman Catholicism, recording in his diary that he ‘‘witnessed the Easter ceremonies within St. Peter’s abounding in excellent music’’ (April 15, 1887) and commenting as well on his exhilarating tour of the Vatican museums

(April 20, 1887). Significantly, in describing his return to Rome in Life and Times, he evokes a sense of the progressive movement of history and race from east to west, as he talks of passing in ‘‘sight of Crete, looking from the deck of our steamer perhaps as it did when Paul saw it on the voyage to Rome eighteen hundred years ago’’ (LT, 587). Linking himself to Paul, celebrated by Apess and other native American evangelicals as a person of color with a color-blind commitment to spreading the Gospel, he asserts his ties to the rise of Christianity and progress in the West and reaffirms his identity as an antiracist leader and as a person of mixed blood. Douglass’s letters and diary entries of 1886 and 1887, then, suggest that he initially conceived of Rome as a stopping point on the road to Africa in his eastward journey from lighter skinned to darker skinned peoples and nations. But by the time he wrote Life and Times, Rome comes to seem to Douglass the more rhetorically useful locale; he wants to place himself (and American blacks) more on the westward road to the United States than on the eastward road to Africa. One reason that Douglass wanted to demonstrate a greater allegiance to Europe than to Africa was that he sought to challenge the notion that he and other blacks had some ‘‘natural’’ connection to black nationhood; such a challenge was consistent with his career-long resistance to colonization and emigration programs that would transport African Americans to what he termed ‘‘the pestilential shores of Africa’’ (Papers, 2 : 437). He was also concerned that the development of a chauvinistic ‘‘race pride’’ among African Americans would only further contribute to the (self-) segregationist practices that kept blacks in the anomalous position of being what he termed a ‘‘nation, in the midst of a nation’’ (Papers, 2 : 427). And of course through his representation of his marriage and travels, he wanted to promote a racial mixing that would teach the large truth that Douglass took from Acts 17 : 26, ‘‘that God has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth’’ (Papers, 5 : 413). There was also a specifically political reason for his desire to dissociate African Americans from Africa. In the early 1890s, during his twoyear stint as minister and consul general to Haiti, Douglass was criticized by many white politicians and journalists for having deliberately sabotaged U.S. efforts to obtain naval and trading privileges with Haiti. These critics believed that because Douglass was a black man, he must have been working secretly to forward the interests of a black nation. He resigned from the position in the summer of 1891, around the same time he wrote his account in Life and Times of his visit to Rome. A celebration of Africa at the expense of Rome would have given additional quarter to racists’ arguments about Douglass’s larger allegiance

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to a transnational ideal of black nationhood. And so he presents himself in his autobiography as a patriot of sorts, who sought to gain from his travels that which would contribute to progress and social justice in the United States. Reading Douglass’s account of his travels to Rome prompts us to rethink consensus notions of Rome’s place in the nineteenth-century American imagination. Attending to the politics of race in his account allows us to see more clearly the unstated racial politics of popular travel texts, such as James Jackson Jarves’s Italian Sights and Papal Principles: Seen through American Spectacles (1856) and Charles Eliot Norton’s Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (1859; reprint 1887), which in subtle ways worked to advance the very connections among U.S. republicanism, Anglo-Saxonism, and white privilege that informed the ethnological accounts of the American School and ultimately the racist politics of the post-Reconstruction period.34 Unlike most white American travelers to Rome, Douglass paid heed to racial mixture and extolled not the triumph of Anglo-Saxonism but the miscegenated origins of Western civilization. But even with these differences, there are important similarities between Douglass’s and other U.S. visitors’ conflicted attraction to Rome as a refuge from the struggles and anxieties of Protestantrepublican America. Worn down by his diplomatic misadventures and the continuing struggle for black rights in the United States, Douglass, in his brief description in Life and Times of the additional two weeks he spent in Rome after returning there from Egypt, seems to be yearning for yet another return to Rome. ‘‘The longer one stays [in Rome],’’ he writes, ‘‘the longer one wants to stay,’’ and he remarks that while in Rome for those two weeks he felt a great sense of humility in contemplating ‘‘the vanity of all things’’ (LT, 588). One of the most moving aspects of Douglass’s account of Rome is just how conventional that account becomes by the very end. notes This essay first appeared in African American Review 34 (2000). My thanks to the editors for their permission to reprint. 1. For excellent accounts of nineteenth-century Americans’ conflicted responses to Rome, see William L. Vance, America’s Rome, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), and Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Also useful are David Brion Davis, ‘‘Some Themes of CounterSubversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,’’ Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (1960): 205–24; Paul Baker,

The Fortunate Pilgrims: Americans in Italy: 1800 –1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Nathalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers: Allston to James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965); and Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself: His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 572. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated LT. 3. The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, vol. 5 of Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame et al. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979–1992), 146. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated Papers, followed by volume and page numbers. 4. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael proclaims that Queequeg belongs to ‘‘the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that,’’ Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), 83. 5. ‘‘The Twelfth Volume of Frederick Douglass’ Paper,’’ Douglass’ Monthly 1 (1859): 2. 6. The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 4, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 443. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated LW, followed by volume and page numbers. 7. Gregory Stephens, On Racial Frontiers: The Biracial Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Marley (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 2. 8. For an early instance of Douglass’s compelling use of the concept of ‘‘Composite Nationality,’’ see ‘‘Our Composite Nationality: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on 7 December 1869,’’ which attacks white racists’ responses to Chinese immigrants (Papers, 4 : 257). On Douglass’s notion of ‘‘A Composite American Nationality,’’ see Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 197–224. For an excellent discussion of whites’ concerns about miscegenation during this period, see Saidya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 184– 90. 9. My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People. 1881. From Fugitive Slave to Free Man: The Autobiographies of William Wells Brown, ed. William L. Andrews (New York: Mentor, 1993), 111–296. 10. Richard H. Brodhead, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (New York: Penguin, 1990), xiv. 11. In a letter of September 1, 1887, Douglass remarked to Francis J. Grimke´: ‘‘Egypt and Greece were not in our calculations when we left home—and Rome was definitely not so,’’ LW, 4 : 448. 12. Quoted in William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 332.

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13. On Douglass in England, see McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 324–28; on Douglass and Julia Griffiths Crofts, see esp. 162– 66, 326. 14. Theodore Stanton, ‘‘Frederick Douglass in Paris,’’ The Open Court. A Fortnightly Journal, Devoted to the Work of Establishing Ethics and Religion Upon a Scientific Basis 1 (1887): 151. 15. On Douglass in Paris, see Benjamin Quarles, Frederick Douglass (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1948), 305–8. 16. Quoted in J. C. Nott and Geo. R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, and Upon Their Natural, Geographical, Philological, and Biblical History (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), 214. 17. For a fuller discussion of Douglass’s ‘‘Claims,’’ see Robert S. Levine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 9–12. On Morton and the ‘‘American School’’ of anthropology, see Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), chap. 4; Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, chap. 9; and Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), chaps. 3 and 5. As Martin points out, Morton eventually modified his views on Egypt although he continued to argue ‘‘that ancient Egypt’s greatness derived from the Caucasian admixture’’ (226). 18. My thanks to the librarians in the manuscript division of the Library of Congress for allowing me to work with the manuscript of Douglass’s diary, which is also available on Reel #1 of the Library’s microfilmed collection of the Papers of Frederick Douglass. 19. Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 44. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 20. On Douglass and Rome, see Quarles, Frederick Douglass, 309–11, and McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 328–29. Douglass was not alone in remarking on the darkness of the Romans. In Italian Hours, Henry James regularly refers to the ‘‘dusky’’ Italians. On race and ‘‘ethnography’’ in James and other travel writers of the period, see Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 15–59. 21. Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 267. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated Notes. 22. Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 192. 23. Ibid., 195. Lloyd A. Thompson similarly argues that in Rome the ‘‘structures of society carried no inherent prejudice against blacks qua blacks,’’ and he refers to ‘‘the constant process of inbreeding which regularly placed progeny and descendants of Aethiopes in the somatic categories ‘swarthy’ and ‘white,’ ’’ Romans and Blacks (London: Routledge, 1989), 162. 24. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni

(New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 231, 234. Subsequent references will appear in the text abbreviated MF. 25. On race in The Marble Faun, see Evan Carton, The Marble Faun: Hawthorne’s Transformations (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 112–14. 26. On the Puritan origins of the evangelical impulse to conceive of American Indians as the lost tribe of Israel, see Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 58. 27. ‘‘An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,’’ in On Our Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O. Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 158. Subsequent references will appear in the text. 28. Ibid., 160. 29. Ibid., 157. 30. Quoted in McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 332. 31. David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 8. 32. Martin criticizes Douglass’s turn against Egypt and Africa (The Mind of Frederick Douglass, 207–10). For a more sympathetic and equally nuanced account of Douglass’s ultimate dissatisfaction with Egypt, see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80 –81, 130. (Moses also develops a useful critique of Bernal’s Egyptocentrism; see esp. 48–51.) On the importance of notions of progress to Douglass’s Life and Times, see Kenneth W. Warren, ‘‘Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times: Progressive Rhetoric and the Problem of Constituency,’’ in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 253–70. 33. My reading of Douglass’s religious stirrings departs from Warren, who sees Douglass intent on demonstrating that ‘‘the religious spirit is alien to the world of progress’’ (‘‘Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times,’’ 267). Douglass seems to me to be suggesting that the world of progress gives rise to religious desires, which Rome more than Egypt perhaps better helps to satisfy. 34. On Anglo-Saxonism and aesthetic appreciation, particularly with reference to Charles Eliot Norton, see Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 –1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 243– 47.

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contributors

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brigitte bailey teaches American literature and American studies

at the University of New Hampshire. She has published essays on nineteenth-century travel writing, art, and aesthetics and is currently at work on a booklength study of the intersections of tourism, visual culture, and the formation of a representative American national subjectivity, Pictures of Italy: Class, Gender, and Aesthetics in American Tourist Writings, 1800 –1865.

susan m. griffin, professor of English at the University of Louisville and editor of The Henry James Review, is author of The Historical Eye: The Texture of the Visual in Late James (1991) and coeditor of The Art of Criticism (1986). Her current project is a study of nineteenth-century anti-Catholic fiction, parts of which have been published in PMLA and Legacy. kristie hamilton, associate professor at the University of Wiscon-

sin–Milwaukee, teaches in the Literary Studies and Modern Studies programs at the English Department. She is the author of America’s Sketchbook: The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre (1998) and has published essays and reviews on eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury American literature and culture. She is a consulting editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies and a member of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society Advisory Board.

robert s. levine is professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and

Melville (1989) and Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (1997) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998), a Bedford Cultural edition of William Wells Brown’s Clotel (2000), and a Penguin Classics edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (2000).

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robert k. martin is professor of English and chair of the department at the Universite´ de Montre´al. He is the author of The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (1979, 1998) and Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (1986), as well as editor of The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman (1992), coeditor (with G. Piggford) of Queer Forster (1997), and coeditor (with E. Savoy) of American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (1998).

contributors

robert milder, professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, has published widely on American Renaissance authors, including Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. He is author of Reimagining Thoreau (1995), editor of Critical Essays on Melville’s ‘‘Billy Budd, Sailor’’ (1989), and coeditor (with John Bryant) of Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays (1997). richard h. millington is associate professor of English at Smith College. He is the author of Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction, the coeditor of Hitchcock’s America (1999), and has published essays on Hawthorne and Willa Cather. adam parkes received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Rochester in 1993. He is now an associate professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses in modern British and American literature. His publications include Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (1996), essays on Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, and Pound. At present he is working on a new book on literary impressionism, tentatively titled First Impressions. leland s. person is professor of English and head of the English Department at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Aesthetic Headaches: Women and a Masculine Poetics in Poe, Melville, and Hawthorne (1988) and has published many articles on nineteenth-century American literature, especially on Hawthorne and James. He is past president of both the Henry James Society and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society.

nancy proctor is a curator, filmmaker, and artistic director of

NEW ART electronic gallery and critical review in London. She has recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Leeds on nineteenthcentury women sculptors in Italy, about whom she has lectured extensively and written for the Fitzroy-Dearborn Dictionary of Women Sculptors (1997) as well as the New Oxford Biographical Dictionary.

john carlos rowe teaches the literatures and cultures of the

United States and critical theories at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness, Through the Custom House: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Modern Theory, The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature, and The Other Henry James. He has recently completed Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II.

priscilla l. walton is professor of English at Carleton University. She is the author of Patriarchal Desire and Victorian Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of Anthony Trollope’s ‘‘Palliser Novels’’ (1995), The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James (1992), and (with Manina Jones) Detective Agency: Women Re-Writing the Hardboiled Tradition (1999). She is coeditor of the Canadian Review of American Studies.

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index Adams, Henry, 221 Adams, James Eli, 162 Akers, Benjamin Paul, 102 n. 32; Dead Pearl Diver, 61, 86–87, 133 American Indian. See Native American Andersen, Hendrik, 108– 9, 116, 124–25, 127–28, 129–30, 133, 135 n. 7 Anderson, Benedict, 175 androgyny, 35, 98 Antinous, 218 anti-semitism, 42 Apess, William, 236, 237, 241 Apollo Belvedere, 220 Archdeacon, Thomas, 198 Arnold, Matthew, 216, 221 Arvin, Newton, 216 Auerbach, Jonathan, 112 Baker, Paul, 1 Bakhtin, M. M., 37 Balzac, Honore´ de, 182 Barberini Faun, 118 Baym, Nina, 112 Beatrice Cenci. See Guido Reni Beecher, Henry Ward, 231 Bell, Michael Davitt, 192 Bell, Millicent, 75, 122 Benjamin, Walter, 178, 179 Bentley, Nancy, 9, 28, 32, 57– 58 n. 17, 118

o

Bernal, Martin, 216 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 119 Blumin, Stuart, 11 Bonheur, Rosa, 36 Boott, Lizzie, 92 Brand, Dana, 179 Bremer, Frederika, 102–3 n. 39 Brodhead, Richard H., 9, 27 n. 17, 183, 191, 194, 230 Brown, Dona, 11, 13 Brown, William Wells, 229 Browne, J. Ross, 215 Browning, Robert, 159 Buonomo, Leonardo, 2, 185 Butler, Judith, 30 Byron, Lord, 222

Cady, Edwin H., 192 Caesar, Julius, 219 Cameron, Sharon, 121 Capitoline Museum (Rome), 19, 117–18, 123, 131, 138 n. 28, 218, 219 Carlyle, Thomas, 218 carnival, 21, 23, 28–38 Carton, Evan, 45, 58 n. 17 Catholicism, 9, 191–203, 210, 226, 234, 237 Channing, Ellery, 15 Chapin, Charles V., 153 Child, Francis, 194 Child, Lydia Maria, 42, 185

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Cleopatra. See William Wetmore Story Cleveland, Grover, 230 Cole, Thomas, 210 –11 Colosseum (Rome), 131, 145, 148, 222 Cooper, James Fenimore, 4, 41, 43– 47, 50, 55; Deerslayer, 46; Last of the Mohicans, 4, 41, 43– 47, 50, 55 Copjec, Joan, 62, 63 Crary, Jonathan, 51 Craven, Wayne, 78 Crawford, Thomas, 78 Crews, Frederick, 29, 112 Crofts, Julia Griffiths, 231 cross-dressing, 36–37 Curtis, George William, 209, 219 Cushman, Charlotte, 36 Darwin, Charles, 43 Delany, Martin, 230 Derrick, Scott, 85, 98, 99 n. 6 Dettlaff, Shirley M., 220 dinosaurs, 41 dis-ease, 140 –57 Domenichino, 167 Donizetti, Gaetano, 90 Dore´, Gustave, 231 Douglass, Anna, 227 Douglass, Frederick, 7–8, 226– 42; ‘‘Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,’’ 232, 238; Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 226– 42; My Bondage and My Freedom, 239; ‘‘Nation’s Problem,’’ 227 Douglass, Lewis, 239 Dumas, Alexandre, 231 During, Simon, 177–78, 179 Duyckinck, Evert, 220 Dyer, Richard, 141– 42, 143 Dying Galatian, 19, 123, 124 Dying Gladiator, 19, 123 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth, 68 Edel, Leon, 135 Ellmann, Richard, 110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 73, 233–34 Epstein, Julia, 142– 43

Farnese Hercules, 114, 116 Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 182 Fern, Fanny, 78 Finkelstein, Dorothee Metlitsky, 207 Fisher, Philip, 42, 46, 50 flaneur, 178, 179 Foley, Margaret, 77 Forster, E. M., 2 Fourier, Charles, 182 Franchot, Jenny, 9, 191, 199 Frith, William Powell, 165 Fuller, Margaret, 2, 6, 36, 38, 73, 74, 75, 89, 92, 175–87; Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 80, 101 n. 30 Fuller, Timothy, 189 n. 21 Gautier, The´ophile, 160 gender, 29–38, 60 –71, 85, 86, 107–35, 140 –57, 175, 176, 187, 191–203; biological view of, 30; confusion, 30, 31, 34, 85, 86, 200 –2; performative view of, 30 Gerdts, William, 114, 133 Gibbon, Edward, 207 Gibson, John, 68, 76, 83; Tinted Venus, 113, 114 Gliddon, George, 232, 233 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1 Gollin, Rita K., 75, 83 Goshgarian, G. M., 49, 58 n. 24 Granger, Jean-Pierre, 127 Greeley, Horace, 178 Greenough, Horatio, 78; George Washington, 94, 111 Grimke´, Francis J., 228 Gulick, John, 223 Habegger, Alfred, 192, 195, 199 Hale, Edward Everett, 12 Hale, Enoch, 10 –11 Hale, Lucretia, 10, 12 Hale, Nathan, 10 Hale, Sarah, 10, 11, 12 Halttunen, Karen, 11 Hamilton, Kristie, 26 n. 3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 9–25, 28– 38, 41–55, 60 –71, 73– 99, 107– 23, 124–35, 140, 175–80, 183–

87, 191, 192, 197–203, 206, 215–16, 218, 220, 223, 226, 236, 237; ‘‘Ambitious Guest,’’ 13; American Notebooks, 43; ‘‘Artist of the Beautiful,’’ 116; ‘‘Birthmark,’’ 7, 197; Blithedale Romance, 30, 31–32, 38, 74, 112, 116, 178, 179; English Notebooks, 215; ‘‘Ethan Brand,’’ 102 n. 35; French and Italian Notebooks, 35, 74, 95; ‘‘Great Stone Face,’’ 13; House of the Seven Gables, 39 n. 21, 203; Marble Faun, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9–25, 28–38, 41, 43–55, 60 –71, 73, 76, 79, 81–85, 87, 91, 95, 96, 98, 107–35, 140, 175, 176, 180, 183–87, 236; ‘‘May Pole of Merry Mount,’’ 33; ‘‘Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe,’’ 32; ‘‘My Kinsman Major Molineux,’’ 30; ‘‘My Visit to Niagara,’’ 13; ‘‘Old Manse,’’ 14–17, 20, 21, 51; ‘‘Passages from a Relinquished Work,’’ 29–32; Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, 108; ‘‘Rappaccini’s Daughter,’’ 7, 197, 201; Scarlet Letter, 32, 85–86, 94– 95; ‘‘Sketches from Memory,’’ 13 Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody, 60 Hay, John, 194 Herbert, T. Walter, 9, 28, 36, 50, 78, 100 n. 19, 184 heterosexuality, 46, 50, 89, 98, 106 n. 61, 120 –21, 122, 130 – 31, 134 Hillard, George, 19; Six Months in Italy, 18, 27 n. 17 Holker, Sir John, 165 homoeroticism, 75, 86, 89, 94– 95, 96, 97, 98, 109, 121, 126, 134 homophobia, 36, 106 n. 61 homosexuality, 29, 75, 83–84, 86, 98, 111, 126, 149 homosocial, 75, 81, 86, 97, 98, 120, 122, 127, 134 Hosmer, Harriet, frontispiece, 4, 5, 60 –71, 75–77, 84, 97, 105 n. 55, 187; African Sibyl, 79; Beatrice

Cenci, 76, 77; Clasped Hands, 76, 104 n. 46; Sleeping Faun, 118, 119; Zenobia in Chains, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 76, 80, 81, 82, 186 Howells, William Dean: Fearful Responsibility, 199; Foregone Conclusion, 6, 7, 191–203; Italian Journeys, 195; Venetian Life, 195 Hugo, Victor, 182, 183 Idol, John L., Jr., 75, 83 Indian Removal Policy, 45, 46 Indians. See Native Americans James, Henry, 36, 73– 99, 107–35, 140 –57, 159–72, 194– 95, 196, 198, 201; ‘‘Adina,’’ 5, 89– 97; Ambassadors, 194; American Scene, 159; Aspern Papers, 140, 152; ‘‘At Isella,’’ 93; Daisy Miller, 5, 36, 140, 141, 143– 46, 148, 149, 151, 154, 157; Golden Bowl, 152, 153–57; Hawthorne, 108, 125; Italian Hours, 5, 6, 92, 140, 142, 143, 152, 159–72; ‘‘Last of the Valerii,’’ 75, 89, 91, 93; ‘‘Light Man,’’ 89; Portrait of a Lady, 5, 140, 149–52, 154, 157, 168–71; Princess Casamassima, 152; ‘‘Recent Florence,’’ 162, 164; Roderick Hudson, 5, 107, 109, 110, 112, 123–35, 140, 141, 146– 49, 151, 154, 157; ‘‘Roman Rides,’’ 92; Turn of the Screw, 97; ‘‘Venice,’’ 160; ‘‘Venice: An Early Impression,’’ 160; William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 5, 73, 74– 75, 77, 83, 85, 88, 89, 93, 98, 124; Wings of the Dove, 140, 152 James, William, 237 Jarves, James Jackson, 242 Jefferson, Thomas, 235–36 Kaplan, Fred, 127 Kasson, Joy S., 110, 186 Kemp, Mark, 28 Knox, Robert, 233 Koch, Robert, 153 Kraut, Alan, 152, 153

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Lacan, Jacques, 63, 65, 67– 68, 69, 70, 71 n. 2 Lamartine, Alphonse Marie Louis de, 231 Lander, Louisa, 4, 60, 77, 78, 97, 98, 100 n. 19, 137 n. 23 Lane, Christopher, 139 n. 50 Laocoo¨n, 220, 223 Lears, Jackson T., 192 Leavitt, Judith Walzer, 152, 153 leisure, 9–25 Levine, Robert S., 9, 29, 183, 185 Lewis, Edmonia, 4, 77, 234, 239 Light in the Piazza, 1 Litvak, Joseph, 38 Logan, Peter, 143 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 194; ‘‘Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’’ 41, 42; Song of Hiawatha, 42 Mallon, Mary, 153, 155, 156 Marble Faun. See Praxiteles; Nathaniel Hawthorne Martin, Robert K., 126, 132–33, 149 Martin, Terence, 28 Maves, Carl, 169 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 180, 182 Mellow, James R., 31 Melville, Herman, 7, 206–24; ‘‘Age of the Antonines,’’ 219; ‘‘Apparition,’’ 217; ‘‘Attic Landscape,’’ 217; Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 207, 210, 211, 217; ‘‘Benito Cereno,’’ 240; Billy Budd, 210; Clarel, 207, 210, 213, 214, 215, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224; Confidence-Man, 206, 208, 216; Journal, 206, 208– 9, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218; ‘‘Misgivings,’’ 211; Moby-Dick, 120, 122, 207, 212, 214, 223, 227; ‘‘Naples in the Time of Bomba,’’ 213; Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, 206, 207, 212, 214; ‘‘Statues in Rome,’’ 7, 206, 221, 222; Timoleon, 217; WhiteJacket, 206, 210 Melville, Malcolm, 223 Mitchell, Catherine C., 178

Mitchell, S. Weir, 11, 22 Mitchell, W. J. T., 41– 42 Morton, Samuel, 232, 233 narratives of extinction, 41–55 Native Americans, 42– 47 Nero, 218 New-York Tribune, 175, 180, 183 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 102 n. 38 Norton, Charles Eliot, 160, 242 Nott, Josiah, 232, 233 nudity, 34, 35, 66– 67, 78, 79, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 97, 101 n. 23, 108–10, 113, 114, 118, 123, 124–25, 129, 133 O’Brien, Father, 198 O’Farrell, Mary Ann, 144 O’Reilly, John Boyle, 194 Ossoli, Marquis Angelo, 74, 92 Owen, Richard, 41 Owen, Robert Dale, 194 Parkman, Francis, 42 Parthenon, 216 Parton, Sara. See Fern, Fanny Pasteur, Louis, 153 Pater, Walter, 117, 127; ‘‘Age of Athletic Prizemen,’’ 116; Renaissance, 107, 110 Person, Leland S., 58 n. 25 Piazza del Popolo, 176, 177, 183, 186 Pierce, Franklin, 13, 81 Pincian Hill, 176, 185, 218 Pitts, Helen, 227 Poe, Edgar Allan, 33, 236 Pollock, Griselda, 179 Pope Julius, 22 Pope Pius IX, 180 Powers, Hiram: Benjamin Franklin, 111; California, 112; George Washington, 107–8, 109, 111–12, 115, 118, 121, 123, 128, 134, 136 n. 12; Greek Slave, 79, 86, 88, 101 n. 25, 110; Thomas Jefferson, 111 Praxiteles, 20, 33, 34–36, 114,

115–19, 123, 125, 128–29, 138 n. 28 Prichard, James Cowles, 239 Quirinal, 177, 181, 185 race, 29, 31–32, 41–55, 57 n. 17, 77, 118, 140 –57, 226– 42; and miscegenation, 32, 34; mixed, 45, 49, 50, 77, 229, 230, 231, 235, 236, 239; and ‘‘whiteness,’’ 140 – 57, 231 Red Faun, 117–18 Remond, Charles, 234 Remond, Sarah, 234 Reni, Guido, 167; Beatrice Cenci, 47, 71, 74, 85 Reynolds, Larry J., 187 Richardson, Anna, 230 –31 Richardson, Ellen, 230 –31 Rodgers, Daniel T., 11, 22 Roman Holiday, 1–2 Romero, Lora, 78 Ruskin, John, 6, 159–72; Mornings in Florence, 162; St. Mark’s Rest, 161 Ryan, Mary P., 184, 186–87 Said, Edward W., 209 Saint Peter, 234–35 St. Peter’s Cathedral, 64, 176, 218, 227, 234 Sand, George, 37 Savoy, Eric, 110 Schiller, Johann, 220, 223 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 51 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe, 44 Sealts, Merton M., Jr., 207 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 109, 121 sexuality, 29–36, 46, 50, 70, 73– 99, 107, 109, 110, 120 –21, 126, 129, 130 –31, 133, 134, 142, 151, 162, 184, 185, 192, 193, 200, 201. See also heterosexuality; homosexuality Shakespeare, William, 32, 33, 46, 200; Midsummer Night’s Dream, 33; Othello, 200 Shaw, Judge Lemuel, 206 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 93

Sherwood, Dolly, 79 Siegel, Lee J., 106 n. 61 Snowden, Frank M., 236 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 116, 126 Some Like It Hot, 31 Spencer, Elizabeth, 1 Stallybrass, Peter, 38 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 231 Stanton, Theodore, 231 Stebbins, Emma, 77 Stendhal, 160 Stephens, Gregory, 229 Story, William Wetmore, 4, 34, 62, 78, 84, 87, 97; ‘‘Cleopatra,’’ 83; Cleopatra, 4, 34, 59 n. 32, 62, 65– 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 79, 82, 83, 124; Libyan Sibyl, 79, 80; Medea, 88 Stowe, William W., 180 Sumner, Mrs. Charles, 92 Sundquist, Eric, 44 Tanner, Tony, 165 Tarpeian Rock, 103 n. 39, 120 –22, 131 Thomas, W. H., 228 Tiberius, 218 Tilton, Theodore, 231 Tintner, Adeline R., 75, 169 Tintoretto, 167 Twain, Mark, 214, 215 ‘‘Typhoid Mary.’’ See Mallon, Mary Urry, John, 175 Vance, William L., 180 –81 Vatican Museum, 240 – 41 Venus de Medici, 83, 95, 220 Vidal, Gore, 31 Von Mehren, Joan, 178 Vrettos, Athena, 142 Walker, David, 239 Warner, Charles Dudley, 215 Wheatley, Phillis, 235 Whistler, James McNeill, 163, 164, 165– 66, 173–74 n. 12 White, Allon, 38 ‘‘whiteness.’’ See race

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Whitman, Walt, 133, 208 Wilde, Oscar, 109; ‘‘Young King,’’ 117 Williams, Tennessee, 2 Winckelmann, Johann, 107, 127 Winner, Viola Hopkins, 75

256

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Wister, Sarah, 92 Woodress, James L., 194 Wright, Nathalia, 2 Young, Robert, 34