of Incest and Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci

The "Ghosting" of Incest and Female Relations in
Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci
Vivien Green Fryd
Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) belonged to that group of
expatriate American women sculptors in Rome whom Henry
James dubbed "a white marmorean flock." 1 These artists, like
their male counterparts, created idealized Neoclassical works
that immortalized didactic narratives and moral concepts in
stone. Hosmer diverged from her colleagues of both sexes,
however, by specializing in studies of heroic women whose
deprivation, victimization, captivity, and/or impending death
ultimately rendered them sympathetic. 2 During her time in
Rome, Hosmer produced several major works depicting such
wronged historical or mythological females: Zenobia (1859,
Fig. 1), the third-century queen of Palmyra captured by the
Romans; Medusa (1854, Fig. 2), the woman of ravishing
beauty turned into a monster by the jealous Athena; and
Beatrice Cenci (1853-55, Fig. 9), a sixteenth-century Italian
woman condemned to death by the Church for patricide,
even though the father she killed had raped her. I focus
primarily on the latter sculpture, derived in part from Percy
Bysshe Shelley's verse play The Cenci (1819), which told the
story of "national and universal interest," "incestuous pas-
sion," and "cruelty and violence." Beatrice Cenci, "after long
and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a
perpetual contamination both of body and mind," plotted
with her stepmother, Lucretia, and her brother Giacomo to
murder "their common tyrant"—Count Francesco Cenci.
The Church accused, tortured, tried, and condemned all
three, executing them in public on September 11, 1599. 3
Viewed within the context of mid-nineteenth-century atti-
tudes toward gender and sexuality, Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci
reveals that the artist recognized ways in which texts about
Beatrice Cenci "ghosted" her status as a victim of incestual
rape. The sculpture's subject, patricide in retaliation for in-
cest, as well as Cenci's heroism in light of her punishment,
intersects with the artist's unconventional lifestyle and sexu-
ality. These two subjects—intimate female relationships and
patricide in retaliation for incestual rape—may seem to be
separate strands. They form, however, a complex web, a
nexus, that derives from society's containment and condem-
nation of sexuality, Hosmer's interest in unconventional be-
havior about normative sexuality, Cenci's radical striking
back against patriarchal oppression in the form of her raping
father, and the nineteenth-century women's movement,
which centered on suffrage but also was concerned with
altering the power relations between men and women. A
"conspiracy of silence," as it were, infects both Hosmer's
subject for the statue and her personal position; her covert
handling of the incest theme is related to the covertness of
her own identity and sexuality, and her nonnormative sexu-
ality gave her a vantage point from which to consider another
type of nonnormative sexuality: incest. Although some might
not consider incest a form of sexuality, it is so for an incest
survivor as well as the rapist, albeit perverse, illegal, and
scarring for the victim.
Hosmer's sexuality and Cenci's murder of her father both
imply a radical critique of patriarchal culture. Hosmer's life,
the sculpture itself, and the literary sources for the sculpture
all converge in the expression and repression of unconven-
tional sexualities in the United States during the mid-nine-
teenth century. Hosmer is the object of patriarchal culture's
disapproval, because of her lifestyle and sexuality, at the same
time that she critiques that culture as an artist by choosing a
model of problematic sexuality and retaliation for rape and
incest.
In using the term "ghosting" to discuss incest, I borrow
from Terry Castle, who asserts that same-sex female relation-
ships have "been 'ghosted'—or made to seem invisible—by
culture itself." It is a taboo, an "insidious and ascetical kind of
denial" that results in "a silenced lesbian past." 4 I apply the
term to Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci, through which the artist
addressed another sexual taboo: incest. Clearly, consensual
love between partners of the same or opposite sex is not the
same kind of "love" that exists in a parent-child incestual
relationship. "Love" in the latter case is complicated on many
levels, reflecting the parent's control and power over the
child, the child's lack of consent (or, especially on the part of
a younger child, the adult's coercion of that consent), and
the child's confusion, fear, shame, and self-hatred. The per-
petrator's "love" is also complex, involving both narcissistic
self-love and self-loathing. In arguing that Hosmer "ghosts"
same-sex relationships in her life and incest in Beatrice Cenci,
I am not equating these two sexualities; it is Hosmer's emo-
tional and sexual life that, like the sexual violence at the heart
of the story of Beatrice Cenci, is "ghosted."
I believe that Beatrice Cenci constitutes a "ghosted" incest
narrative in a covert and sublimated form. Exposing and
analyzing this subject will serve to reinsert into American
discourse a subject that is "both [a] product and source of
textual [and visual] anxiety, contradiction, or censorship" in
American culture, 5 one that needed to be suppressed during
a period dominated by the Victorian "conspiracy of silence"
regarding sexuality. (In fact, the incest narrative did not fully
and clearly enter American discourse until the 1970s.) 6 Hos-
mer's Beatrice Cenci reiterates the "structuring absence" of
incest within nineteenth-century American culture to which
other artists and writers adhered, both suppressing and ex-
pressing this taboo subject. 7
As Michel Foucault observes in The History of Sexuality,
"silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden
to name ... is less the absolute limit of discourse . . . than an
element that functions alongside the things said." These
many "silences," Foucault maintains, "are an integral part of
the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses." 8 Fou-
cault proposes that homosexuality, emerging in the 1880s,

makes these silences palpable, creating a subject "marked,"
according to the art historian Richard Meyer, "by erasures
and ellipses, by secrets and structuring absences." These
telling erasures and silences, which convey "both ignorance
and knowledge" 10 and which are fed by social and moral
discretion, have much to say within the context of incest. I
prefer the term "ghosting" rather than "silence" with regard
to Hosmer's statue because the latter signifies an absence or
erasure, while the former implies a residue of meaning—a
trace—and it is this trace that I want to explore. Whereas one
dictionary definition of "silence" includes "absence of men-
tion," "oblivion, "secrecy"—something that is covered over—
"ghost" is defined as "a faint shadowy trace," one that can
never be erased. "Ghosting" is thus the "simultaneity of rev-
elation and concealment," of something visible and invisible,
because as a trace it "exists as the material residue of events
that have occurred in the past," marking not only "that which
is present, but that which is absent but still detectable in
absence," a signifier of "an absent presence." 11 I also suggest
that other "traces"—in fact, "faint shadowy trace [s]"—in the
statue relate to Hosmer's own nonnormative sexuality in
which artist and subject (Beatrice) reject patriarchal author-
ity.
Nothing in Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci indicates incest or pat-
ricide in retaliation for incest; this is an important ghosting.
Hosmer could have clarified the statue's subject matter by
rendering a different scene, one in which Beatrice is raped by
her father (a version, perhaps, of Titian's Tarquin and Lucre-
tia, Fig. 3), or one in which she murders her father (a version
of Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes, Fig. 4). She
could also have created a group sculpture in which a large,
looming, dominant male figure assaults a younger woman
whose body and sexuality would be more visible than they are
in the existing work. The absence of these clear iconographic
and figurative precedents or motifs results in an ambiguous
statue; aspects of its content are subliminal and vague. The
same can be said about the subject of incest in nineteenth-
century British and American texts, including Hosmer's
statue.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and
Harriet Hosmer
Nathaniel Hawthorne turned Beatrice Cenci into the central
figure of Miriam in The Marble Faun (1859), inspired by both
Hosmer's statue, which predates this novel, and the Portrait of
Beatrice Cenci, attributed to Guido Reni, in the Palazzo Bar-
berini in Rome. 12 Herman Melville earlier had used Beatrice
Cenci as a leitmotif for brother-sister incest in Pierre, or The
Ambiguities (1852). Whereas Hawthorne never clearly identi-
fies the horrors of Cenci's biography (nor that of his charac-
ter Miriam, who is haunted throughout the romance by a
dubious and mysterious history), Melville specifically ponders
"the two most horrible crimes (of one of which she is the
object, and of the other the agent) possible to civilized hu-
manity—incest and parricide." 13 Melville thus emphasizes the
paradoxes of Beatrice Cenci's role as both victim and victim-
izer.
Although Melville names the two egregious acts contained
in the Cenci tragedy, Hawthorne and Hosmer fail to name
incest. In part, this is because they assume that the reader/
viewer knows about it. Hawthorne pondered whether "it were
possible for some spectator" to respond to Reni's Portrait of
Beatrice Cenci "without knowing anything of its subject or
history: for, no doubt, we bring all our knowledge of the
Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of it." 14 As Hawthorne
recognized, many viewers of the Reni portrait would perceive
the work as "the very saddest. . . that ever was painted or
conceived" because of their familiarity with the almost un-
speakable narrative. 15 Presumably, the same was true of Hos-
mer's statue.
Hawthorne articulates the viewer's necessary yet challeng-
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ing role in reading the narrative of Hosmer's statue. Nine-
teenth-century Americans on the grand tour of Rome who
viewed the Reni portrait and Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci in the
artist's studio and those who visited its exhibition in London
and various cities in the United States would have pondered,
in Hawthorne's words, the paradoxes of this woman who
appears "like a fallen angel, fallen, without sin," whom "no
sympathy could reach." 16
Knowledge of the Cenci family's history leads to a startling
recognition that Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci, like Hawthorne's
Marble Faun and Melville's Pierre, embodies a series of para-
doxes encompassing the state of both/and: both innocence
and sin, chastity and sexuality, victim and victimizer, daugh-
ter and sexual partner. 17 In a word, Beatrice Cenci is an
ambivalent figure. Whether Hosmer deliberately addressed
the plight of women in her day through images of heroic
damsels in distress, as some art historians maintain, or chal-
lenged male authority in religion through her involvement
with Spiritualism, as the art historian Charles Colbert ar-
gues, 18 for this work she selected a subject that broaches the
ambiguity, denial, and horror that many Americans experi-
enced around the subject of incest during the Victorian era.
In this work, as in the culture at large, incest is both implied
and erased, another paradox embedded in this statue that
appealed to the serious-minded and the prurient alike. Such
a paradox, however, was probably never intended by the
patron who commissioned a statue for the St. Louis Mercan-
tile Library, leaving the subject matter to the artist's discre-
tion.
Wayman Crow, the St. Louis Mercantile Library
Association, and Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci
In 1849, while a student at Mrs. Charles Sedgwick's School for
Girls, a school for the privileged in Lenox, Massachusetts,

Hosmer befriended Cornelia Crow, who would become a
lifetime friend, confidante, and an important link to her
father, Wayman Crow, with whom Hosmer first became ac-
quainted while visiting the family in 1850. A dry-goods mer-
chant, Crow was a civic-minded citizen and politician in-
volved in many public and private organizations. He was
president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce for ten
years, served two terms in the Missouri State Senate, secured
in 1846 the charter for the St. Louis Mercantile Library
Association (the city's first public library), and in 1853
founded the Eliot Seminary, which three years later became
Washington University. He also provided this educational
institution with an art school and the first art museum west of
the Mississippi River.
Crow quickly became the young sculptor's first benefactor,
advocate, patron, and mentor. He persuaded Dr. Joseph
Nash McDowell of the Missouri Medical College to tutor
Hosmer in anatomy, since she could not take classes in the
all-male medical school. When Hosmer's father withdrew his
financial support in January 1854 because of money prob-
lems, Crow provided funds, "setting her up," as she wrote
appreciatively, "as an artist." The following year, Crow com-
missioned her first full-length, life-size figure, Oenone (ca.
1855). Six years later, he secured for her the state commis-
sion to create a bronze statue of Senator Thomas Hart Ben-
ton. Crow and Hosmer corresponded until his death in 1885,
Hosmer signing her letters "your affectionate daughter," in-
voking "a personal, familial relationship to explain a profes-
sional connection." 19
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Appropriate and popular sculptural subjects would have been
a captive Indian woman (in the vein of Erastus Dow Palmer,
The White Captive, 1858-59, Fig. 5), the ignoble and "savage"
native (Horatio Greenough, Rescue, 1837-53, Fig. 6), the
disappearing Native American race (Thomas Crawford, The
Indian: Dying Chief, 1856, Fig. 7), or a historical Indian figure
(Joseph Mozier, Pocahontas, 1877, Fig. 8). Hosmer, who had
previously treated heroic women in a mythological and clas-
sical context, would have had to depart from the content of
her oeuvre to produce such an Indian figure or white captive.
Instead, she selected a subject from Italian history that
would help to bring high culture to St. Louis, a city she
claimed to love because "it was there I first began my studies"
and because of the "many generous and indulgent friends
who . . . ministered to the growth of the Arts and Sciences." 21
Cenci's whiteness, manifest in the statue's white marble,
which nevertheless has some dark veins, is consistent with the
library's raison d'etre—westward expansion—for its color sig-
nifies Euro-American settlers in opposition to dark-skinned
Native Americans. Although the racial Other is absent, the
statue's very whiteness signifies this other absent presence. It
is thus ironic that her patron both supported and was a part
of the white patriarchy that Hosmer critiques through her
statue.
It may be that obtaining the commission for this statue
through her "second father," Wayman Crow, made her un-
easy, either because of Crow's reach into her life or her
natural father's abandonment of her. The choice of a subject
connected with incest and patricide, for a sculpture made
possible by a father figure, may be significant. Could this
statue be also an allegory about good fathers and bad fathers?
And one of possibly larger civic implications (that is, Crow as
a benign and responsible civic figure, a good father to his
surrogate daughter as well as to the city of St. Louis, versus
the evil father Cenci, a rogue and a tyrant, and the ultimate
bad father)?
Hosmer was a shrewd businesswoman who realized that her
subject would appeal to Americans who had been on the
grand tour, as well as to the literary and artistic expatriate
crowd in Rome and those who would see the statue at the
Royal Academy in London. These viewers most certainly
would have been familiar with the sixteenth-century Italian

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dramatic potential of the story about the noble and rich
Count Cenci, who had been convicted by the pope three
times because of misdeeds that involved sodomy, according
to Shelley's documentary source, or the plotted murder of his
two sons, according to Shelley's retelling of the story. This
cruel father, the poet explains, celebrated the death of his
two sons with a banquet and imprisoned, abused, and raped
his daughter, who was subsequently tried and beheaded by
the Church. 24 Only the youngest son, Bernardo, survived.
Thus was extinguished the power of one of the noblest and
richest families in Rome.
Jameson narrated a similar account in Lives of Celebrated
Female Sovereigns. Hosmer consulted Jameson from 1857 to
1859 while working on her Zenobia, but the two women
probably met earlier, in 1855, while the sculptor was formu-
lating the details for Beatrice Cenci. 20 Jameson's dramatic ac-
count similarly constructs Cenci's father as a "human mon-
ster" who "was a stranger to every redeeming virtue of the
human heart." She elaborates that Count Cenci spent his life
in "debauchery" and mistreated his children, imprisoning
Beatrice "in a remote and unfrequented room of his palace."
Eventually subdued by her "matchless beauty," the count
treated her with greater kindness in preparation for his se-
duction. Jameson agrees that Beatrice, Lucretia, Giacomo,
and one of Beatrice's suitors (Monsignore Guerra) collabo-
rated in killing Francesco. After their arrest, all confessed
except Beatrice, who withstood the rack, and Guerra, who
fled the country. Beatrice finally acquiesced, admitting par-
ticipation in her father's murder in order to erase the "foul
stain" he had cast on their "ancient and honorable house."
Pope Clement VIII condemned the family to public behead-
ing.
Shelley's and Jameson's stories thus roughly concur, pro-
viding Hosmer with the basis for her conception. The sculp-
tor selected one scene from Jameson's dramatic narrative:
Beatrice's steadfast faith while in prison. Jameson recounts
that at the "fatal hour" of Beatrice's execution, she was in
prison "at [her] prayers . . . firm and resolute." Holding a
crucifix in one hand with her arms "lightly bound with
cords," Beatrice walked to the scaffold with "an expression of
resignation and fortitude, a calmness of religious hope," in
preparation for her execution. 26 Hosmer collapsed two of
Jameson's scenes into one—Beatrice in prison, Beatrice hold-
ing a crucifix as she walks to the scaffold—showing instead
the condemned woman reclining lethargically on a bench in
her cell and grasping a rosary in her sleep.
Jameson's text never mentions the word "incest" or speci-
fies the horrible "crimes" that led to Beatrice's death. She
instead employs such phrases as "unhallowed crime," "human
depravity," "frightful catastrophe," "violent scene," and a "cir-
cumstance between Beatrice and her father" that was "mon-
strous." Jameson furthermore describes Beatrice's terror as
she "shrank back in horror and affright, her features con-

vulsed with agony." 27 The reader, it is assumed, could read
between the lines.
Besides deriving from Jameson her image of the woman
steadfast in her faith while in prison, Hosmer based the
statue's pose and facial expression on Shelley's description:
How gently slumber rests upon her face,
Like the last thoughts of some day sweetly spent
Closing in night and dreams, and so prolonged ....
O white innocence ... Thine . .. serenest
countenance. (5.3.1-3, 24, 26)
Hosmer similarly rendered a sleeping woman with a serene
countenance (Fig. 10), creating a sweet statue. Carving the
monumental figure from white marble (which has some vein-
ing), she adhered to Neoclassical characteristics: clear con-
tours; smooth, highly polished surfaces (except for the
roughly textured bench, which emphasizes the harshness of
the prison cell); an idealized body clothed in timeless drap-
eries; and a single viewing point. Neoclassical sculpture is
typically white, as ancient sculptures were then thought to be,
but the whiteness of Beatrice Cenci also conveys innocence and
purity, concepts emphasized repeatedly in Shelley's play.
"She is most innocent," proclaims Marzio, one of the hired
murderers of Count Cenci (5.22.165). "O white innocence,"
declares Beatrice, as if describing the statue Hosmer would
create (5.3.24). Beatrice later muses, shortly before her
death: "Tho' wrapt in a strange cloud of crime and shame, /
[I] lived ever holy and unstained" (5.4. 148-49). One nine-
teenth-century commentator saw "suffering innocence" in
Hosmer's statue, wherein her "scaffold of shame has become
a pedestal of glory." 28 Hosmer's statue conveys the contradic-
tions that this viewer noted, representing Cenci's innocence
and idealization in a monument that indeed places her on a
"pedestal of glory." The statue's whiteness also underscored
the statue's European identity, which contrasts with the ra-
cialized Native Americans that she chose not to sculpt for the
western Mercantile Library, and its black veining, visible only
when close to the statue, marks the figure as imperfect and
stained.
While Beatrice Cenci's white marble suggests innocence,
albeit stained, and Euro-American racial features, its compo-
sition displays restraint and containment. Beatrice's long hair
and headdress (copied from Reni's portrait), with its hori-
zontal folds, emphasize the figure's horizontal composition,
which is reinforced by the base. The descending curve from
her buttocks to her left thigh forms a soft, curvilinear angle
that leads to her foot, which leans against the base on the
same plane as the hand that holds the rosary. The serpentine
lines of the leg, arm, drapery, face, and breast underscore her
peaceful state, which nevertheless appears contained within
the boxlike boundaries that the rectilinear bench echoes.
The compositional choices contribute to "the theme of
woman weighed down and imprisoned in sin, a reflection of
Judeo-Christian notions of woman's guilt inherited from
Eve," as Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock observe; this
imprisoned and chained damsel in distress imparts a sense of
"moral, physical and psychological imprisonment." 29
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empty because the chain is replaced by the other chain, the
rosary, which seems to weigh down her hand more than an
actual rosary should. It is the surrogate chain, more powerful
than the iron one because it is the agent of both her impris-
onment (the Church) and her release (her faith).
Beatrice Cenci's reclining figure on the rectangular base
also evokes entombment, a subject Hosmer would address
later in the funerary Tomb to Judith Falconnet (1857-58), lo-
cated in the church of Sant' Andrea delle Fratte, Rome. Lying
on her back on a couch, that figure, too, holds a rosary to
affirm the deceased sixteen-year-old's faith. Both reclining
figures portray female passivity—that of death in one case,
that of waiting for execution in the other. As the American
Studies' scholar Joy Kasson comments, "In Judith Falconnet,
nineteenth-century viewers would see an exemplary life, a
beloved daughter commemorated by her loving family; but
Beatrice Cenci plumbed the underside of woman's life, her
sexual vulnerability and the fragility of the family," disrupted
by the act of father-daughter incest. In Beatrice Cenci, "Hosmer
pondered the possibility that the female victim might fall prey
to passion, the family might suffer disruption, and peaceful
sleep might yield to nightmarish awakening." 30
Yet the raped parricide, asleep and spotless, is not entirely
peaceful, as the renowned nineteenth-century author and
abolitionist Lydia Maria Child recognized. She interpreted
the figure's repose as "not healthy," because it represents the
"sleep of a body worn out by the wretchedness of the soul."
Beatrice's arm, Child observed, "had been tossing in the
grief-tempest, had fallen heavily, too weary to change itself
into a more easy posture." Child furthermore viewed Bea-
trice's expression as "innocent" yet marked by suffering,
which "had left its traces." This is also evident in her eyes,
which are "veiled by . . . swollen lids" due to incessant tears,
and a mouth "still open" to sigh. 31 Child perceived Cenci's
tormented sleep on a prison bed as an echo of the trauma of
the girl's own bedroom, thereby shifting the drama away
from the notion of innocence and purity. Beatrice Cenci is not,
therefore, just a sleeping recumbent figure; her awkward,
strained pose conjures up the image of a baby who has cried
herself to sleep in the corner of her crib.

The statue contains no overt or clear reference, however,
to the events that led to Beatrice's incarceration. Her ex-
posed breast, elevated buttocks, sinuous curves, and almost
transparent drapery evoke the subject's sexuality, but it ap-
pears subdued and restrained in comparison to other, more
eroticized nineteenth-century Neoclassical sculptures, such as
Hiram Powers's Greek Slave (1841-47, Fig. 11) or Edward
Augustus Brackett's Shipwrecked Mother and Child (1850-51,
Fig. 12). Moreover, the closed pose and clothed body deny
the masculine gaze of desire, while her closed eyes evade
agency over her sexuality. Nevertheless, the exposed breast
with visible nipple, echoed by the point of the pillow, marks
her as a desirable woman. The right leg is pulled in, resting
on the jail block and expressing the confinement of jail. Her
upper torso and head rest on the soft, indented pillow,
offering ultimate release in sleep or death. The head further-
more embodies the intellect, which will be severed from the
site of her sexuality—the body.
Hosmer's statue fails to register anything that signifies
rape, an absence reiterated by reviews of the statue. The
Art-Journal, for example, summarized the story of Beatrice
Cenci in 1857. "Her history was most unhappy," the anony-
mous author notes. She had been "condemned to an igno-
minious death," and yet she "entertained hopes for a par-
don." Hosmer "has represented the unfortunate prisoner" at
the moment when she was "peacefully and calmly asleep in
her miserable cell," holding in one hand a rosary, "which the
fingers, in a state of inaction, refuse to grasp." Critiquing the
face as "not as pleasing as we think it might have been made,"
with a sharp nose and a "rigid expression of the lips," the
author reasons that such "peculiarities" adhere to the sub-
ject's tragic circumstances. 32 The author of this article agrees
with Child that Cenci's face is not entirely untroubled, view-
ing its unpleasant features as signifying her torment and cold
heart ("And yet my heart is cold," she acknowledges in Shel-
ley's play, 5.4.89). Another contemporary assessment in the
Crayon similarly alludes to but does not name the circum-
stances that brought Beatrice Cenci to her prison bed. "The
story of Beatrice Cenci is well known," this author maintains,
alluding to her crime of "parricide," which was 'justifiable, if
the law of nature warrants self-preservation." 33
Shelley's preface to The Cenci, as we have seen, identifies
"incestuous passion," cruelty, and violence as among the
many misdeeds of Count Cenci. Although he specifies the
crime of parricide six times in his verse drama, he never once
uses the word "incest," perhaps deliberately. Even so, the
play's rebarbative content and controversial subject matter
were understood by the public, delaying its first performance
until 1886, and even that was a private production sponsored
by the Shelley Society. No public production took place until
1922, after the Lord Chamberlain had modified the censor-
ship laws in Great Britain. According to critics of this play,
Shelley's primary offense lay in his themes of incest and
patricide. 34
Shelley alludes to but never articulates what led to the
count's murder. In the first act, for example, Count Cenci
demands that a servant bring Beatrice to his chamber "at
midnight and alone" (1.1.145-46). The following day her
pale demeanor, trembling body, and "cold melancholy look"

302
One look, one smile." (Wildly.) Oh! He has trampled
me
Under his feet, and made the blood stream down
My pallid cheeks. (2.1.63-66)
Shelley never identifies that "one word." Did Count Cenci
acknowledge his role in his two sons' deaths, which he had
celebrated at the banquet the previous evening? Did he
express or act on his desire to have sex with his daughter—for
why else would he command his servant to bring her to his
chamber at midnight after the banquet? Or was it that, as
Beatrice claims, "he only struck and cursed me as he passed"
(2.1.75)? Whatever happened, Lucretia became aware of her
stepdaughter's sadness and fear. By the third act, Beatrice's
confused, disheveled, and fearful demeanor and veiled hints
signify her rape, but she cannot name the act. Beatrice stag-
gers and "speaks wildly" at the opening of the third act,
feeling "choked" by "a clinging, black, contaminating mist"
that "glues" her "fingers" and her "limbs to one another, /
And eats into" her "sinews, and dissolves" her "flesh to a
pollution, poisoning / The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of
life!" (3.1.16-23). Her limbs are petrified, her heart weary
because of "such a deed / As . . ." (3.1.55-56). The ellipses in
the text significantly mark the location of the word omitted.
The erased deed—incest—cannot be named, leaving the
signifier absent, although the reader can infer what is signi-
fied, marking the "erasures and ellipses . . . secrets and struc-
turing absences" that Foucault and Meyer identified as signi-
fying "both ignorance and knowledge." Prohibition exists
against speech, but not against wild behavior. "If I try to speak
/ I shall go mad" (3.1.85-86), Beatrice frets, alluding to but
not specifying "The thing that I have suffered. . . . the crime,
and punishment" (3.1.88, 98). Beatrice cannot allow herself
to remember or name what she experienced with her father.
Yet she remembers, but cannot name, what she "endured,"
"a wrong" that remains "expressionless" (3.1.213-14). Shelley
denotes this unexpressed act as a "deed" (3.1.55, 141), an
"outrage" (3.1.348), or "some bitter wrong" (3.1.103, 213),
which by the end of the play becomes a "wound" to more
clearly demarcate the physical violation of Beatrice's body
(5.2.126). The word "incest" remains unspeakable and un-
namable throughout the play, signifying an absent presence
whose traces are always evident.
The Conspiracy of Silence and Trauma of Incest
Shelley's play departs from the norm in Romantic literature,
where "father-daughter incest is almost always portrayed as an
act of sexual seduction and therefore 'normalized' as an
obvious extension of heterosexual practice" in which male
sexuality is tied to dominance and violence. 35 Rather than
presenting a seduction scene, Shelley instead accurately and
sympathetically captures an incest victim's confused, pan-
icked, fearful, anguished, and guilt-ridden sense of shame
and embarrassment in response to experiences of domestic
sexual violence. Beatrice's panic attacks are "aftereffects of
incest," which Shelley may have recognized because of his
wife's experiences. If one accepts a recent scholarly interpre-
tation, Mary Shelley suffered from severe depression—
sparked or exacerbated by the recent death of her two chil-
dren—during the late summer of 1819 while she was writing
Mathilda. 36 Rosaria Champagne posits that Mary Shelley used
Mathilda to "concretize the aftereffects of incest that she
herself experienced." Her father, William Godwin, interfered
with the book's publication because of its revealing content
(he refused to return Mary's only copy, so that the book
could riot be published until 1959). 37 Beatrice's inability to
speak out, her silence, is also characteristic of incest victims.
This is something else Percy Shelley would have understood
from his wife's silence, for it is only in hindsight that Cham-
pagne, a feminist literary scholar, has inferred Mary's inces-
tual relationship with her father through careful readings of
her diaries, letters, and novels. Hosmer's statue similarly
embodies this silence, for the statue cannot speak the reason
for its sadness, isolation, and condemnation, nor does it
contain any clear reference to incest or rape.
Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci employs the same device of "ghost-
ing" found in Shelley's play, Jameson's history, and Haw-
thorne's The Marble Faun, for all four texts "'tell' without
telling," underscoring "the difficulties in fully apprehending
an experience that has not been consciously processed." As

Elizabeth Barnes notes, the function of literature, in terms of
incest, "provides both a means for the displacement of trau-
matic experience onto myth, stories, and so forth," and "a
means for its realization, through witnessing of trauma by
listeners/readers," and, of course, viewers. Barnes continues,
"Though historical evidence of an event may be in abun-
dance, no real knowledge of it exists until the event is 'wit-
nessed'—that is, until someone has become cognizant of
it." 38 As Dori Laub elaborates, "The testimony of the trauma
thus includes its [listener/reader/viewer], who is, so to
speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be
inscribed for the first time." 39 The trauma of incest is ulti-
mately inscribed on Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci, allowing the
viewer who is familiar with the story to understand its com-
plex layers of meaning and thereby to witness and acknowl-
edge its existence.
These texts address another type of silence: the Victorian
"conspiracy of silence" as a means to control and limit sexu-
ality. 40 The white marble in Hosmer's statue thus underscores
the purity demanded by the dominant ideology of the "Cult
of True (White) Womanhood," a term historians have used
to describe the promotion of domestic virtue among middle-
class white American women, arguing that they were con-
fined to the domestic sphere and expected to be virtuous,
expressing the prevailing medical belief that a respectable
woman could not feel sexual passion. 41 The statue's reclining
pose indicates submissiveness, another characteristic of the
True (White) Woman, while the rosary signals that she is,
according to the art historian Laura Prieto, "both blameless
and religious—the pure, pious ideal of the cult of true wom-
anhood." 42 One contemporary critic who noted Beatrice
Cenci's "justifiable parricide" viewed the statue as embodying
the ideals of True (White) Womanhood, interpreting the
hands as showing "refinements [italics mine] and true delicate
perception," while another applauded its "general harmony"
and "graceful figure." 43
Like Powers's Greek Slave (Fig. 11), Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci
enabled viewers to consider female sexuality and vulnerability
during a period of increased concern about the dangers of
sexuality. Both women—one captive, the other imprisoned—
represent the epitome of female sexuality during this period:
resigned, aloof, passionless, endangered, and morally supe-
rior through her steadfast faith. The theme of incest, more-
over, permits the viewer to consider forbidden desire from a
distance, condemning the perpetrator, sympathizing with the
victim, and contemplating the dangers of sexuality within the
morally sanctioned atmosphere of spirituality manifest in the
rosary that Cenci fingers. 44 Beatrice Cenci also inscribes sexu-
ality and guilt onto the scene of innocence, but since the
subject is sleeping, these elements are unconscious.
According to the literary critic Myra Jehlen, women char-
acters in the nineteenth-century sentimental novel became
empowered through their piety, turning into models of fe-
male self-respect by gaining control over their domestic en-
vironment: "the heroine's culminating righteousness and its
concomitant rewards [finding happiness in marriage]
. . . indicate ... a new and quite rare emergence of female
power." Jehlen also observes, "The sentimental cult of domes-
ticity represents] a pragmatic feminism aimed primarily at
establishing a place for women under their own rule" within
the home. 45 Refusing to submit to her ruling father, Beatrice
became insubordinate in the domestic sphere, like the her-
oines in the sentimental novel, creating a countermodel of a
sentimental woman who is actively rather than passively sub-
versive.
The family forms a site for the training of femininity,
producing what Foucault calls "docile bodies" that act in
accordance with the disciplinary power of the Father. 46 As the
literary scholar Peter B. Twitchell argues, the theme of patri-
archal oppression in Shelley's play is embodied in three
figures: Count Cenci, the judge at the trial, and the pope. 47
Within this context, the "docile body" of Hosmer's Beatrice
Cenci adheres to the disciplinary powers of the tripartite
Father, all of whom dictated her submissive, relaxed, and
resigned state. Incest always resides in the power of parents
and the needs of children, who are entirely dependent on
their parents for survival. "The horror of incest," according to
the psychologist Judith Lewis Herman, "is not in the sexual
act, but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of
parental love." 48 This statue, like recent fiction about father-
daughter sexual abuse examined by the literary scholar Min-
rose C. Gwin, "reveals how the father's power in the family is
produced within, and itself reproduces, a cultural space that
has historically emphasized property ownership and built up
an institutionalized system of the containment and usage of
specific women's bodies to those ends." 49 The compositional
containment of the statue constitutes this patriarchal contain-
ment even though Beatrice is restricted in prison for father
slaying.
Hosmer's sculpture contradicts and even critiques the Cult
of True (White) Womanhood in its representation of a
woman who had sex, albeit without consent, with her father.
Although the reclining figure evokes the pious and submis-
sive middle-class white Victorian woman, it fails to suggest a
harmonious home created by a True Woman. Beatrice Cenci
instead signals a dysfunctional family that involved abuse,
incest, and murder. Hosmer brings to the viewer's attention
the internal contradictions of patriarchy: if the father of the
family does not protect his children but perpetuates sexual
violence on them, what justifies his rule over the family? In
the nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity, the family
was a safe haven, the sphere in which purity and piety reigned
supreme. But incest, domestic violence, and rape expose not
only the falsity of this picture but also the very real dangers of
enclosing the family, of making it private and invisible to the
society- 1 at large. Beatrice's "safety" in a prison cell undercuts
the notion of the home as a refuge, protecting purity and
piety; her purity and piety are protected only outside the
home.
Hosmer's critique of the Cult of True (White) Woman-
hood and revelation of its contradictions is related to the
women's movement that developed in the United States dur-
ing the 1840s. The women's rights movement, led by Eliza-
beth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, had its origins in
antislavery and temperance campaigns but came to center on
women's right to vote after the famous Seneca Falls Conven-
tion of 1848, marking one way in which middle-class white
women acted within public arenas in opposition to the Cult
of True (White) Womanhood and revealing how the public
and private spheres were not stable, but malleable. 50 Hos-
303

304
mer's sympathy with this feminist movement increased over
the years. In 1869, visiting Anthony's office in New York City
to subscribe to her magazine, the Revolution, Hosmer met the
famous suffragist. 51 Later, in the 1890s, Hosmer not only
advocated women's right to vote and equality between men
and women but also created Queen Isabella for the Daughters
of Isabella, a Chicago suffragist group, of its patron, Isabella
of Castille, to display at the World's Columbian Exposition. 52
The commission recognized that Hosmer's art "has helped to
lift the women of the century to a higher level." 53 On Antho-
ny's death in 1906, Hosmer praised the woman's suffrage
advocate who had "been toiling on our behalf" for years, and
considered creating a "monument. . . which shall record the
great deeds of great women wherever found." 54 Hosmer's
Beatrice Cenci functions as such a monument, commemorat-
ing a woman who, although both passive and resigned, nev-
ertheless refused to be a victim and who rebelled against
patriarchal authority by killing her raping father.
Normalizing Incest
Besides expressing Hosmer's developing feminist beliefs, Bea-
trice Cenci also embodies some of the contradictions that
incest victims feel. These are summarized by the historian
Linda Gordon: "Father-daughter incest creates confusion
and double binds for girls because of their attempts to meet"
two standards of virtue: "a good girl" must be "sexually pure:
a virgin until marriage, innocent of sexual thoughts and
experience," but she must also be "obedient to and under the
protection of parents and men." Incest victims thus feel
conflict between the expected "feminine balance between
modesty and submission, chastity and obedience." 55
Shortly after the ellipses that mark the word that Shelley's
play cannot name—incest—Beatrice "pauses, suddenly recol-
lecting herself (3.1.56), and then questions whether her
father "should call himself / My father" (3.1.73-74). "Oh,
what am I? / What name, what place, what memory shall be
mine?" (3.1.74-75). These words convey Beatrice's confu-
sion. Is Count Cenci her father or her lover? Is Beatrice his
daughter or sexual partner? In this inversion of the norm, a
father becomes his daughter's surrogate husband, and a
daughter becomes her father's surrogate wife, as in the case
of Count Cenci and Beatrice Cenci. 56
Incest was illegal in the United States from the nation's
inception. Legislatures in the American colonies defined all
sex offenses, including incest, according to the common-law
definition in Great Britain, influenced by the biblical prohi-
bition on incest from Leviticus, which forbade marriages
between persons more closely related, by either blood or
marriage, than fourth cousins. 57 American state legislatures
created "a hybrid civil-criminal statute" that simultaneously
prohibited sexual intercourse and marriage between rela-
tives. The 1779 Vermont statute exemplifies the inequity of
criminal prosecution. It condemned both the victim and the
perpetrator to a whipping, putting offenders in the stocks
and forcing them to wear the letter I to punish them publicly.
Statutes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
continued the regulation of marriage and the prevention of
inbreeding through the assumption of both parties' guilt.
Penalties were relatively light. During the mid-nineteenth
century, incest cases in the United States were prosecuted
under the statutory rape laws, which based culpability on
knowledge of the prohibited age of the female. The statutory
age of consent was initially set at ten or twelve, but over time
the states raised it to fourteen, sixteen, or eighteen. As legal
scholar Leigh B. Bienen summarizes the situation:
The goals incorporated within traditional Incest statutes
include: the orderly regulation of marriage, the preven-
tion of biologically harmful inbreeding, the rhetorical
affirmation of moral and religious precepts derived from
Judaic-Christian traditions generally and from the specific
Biblical prohibition of Leviticus, and the setting out of
punishment for sexual behavior perceived as deviant or
exploitative. 58
Victorian Americans understood the dangers that incest,
especially father-daughter incest, caused in the family, and
also, they believed, in society at large. As the Mississippi high
court ruled in 1852, failure to punish those who commit
incest "would undermine the foundations of social order and
good government." 59 Yet Southern jurists "helped preserve
the patriarchal ideal and minimize state intrusion in the
private sphere" because of the tension between the condem-
nation of incest on the one hand and the support of patriar-
chal culture on the other. 60 Incest was an immoral, criminal
act in which "patriarchal power" is "carried to its most egre-
gious form and . . . the daughter's [or son's] submission
and/or resistance to that power" is played out. 61 Not until the
rape reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s, however,
would sex crimes be redefined in a significant number of
states, resulting in changes and clarification in the legal
system's response to sexual abuse within the family. 62 As this
survey suggests, no laws specifically addressed incest until the
late nineteenth century. It was not named, not visible, not
conceptualized as a separate, specific problem, but rather
subsumed under the rubric of statutory rape or marriage
regulations.
In fact, not all cultural texts concurred with the law's
condemnation of the act. Karen Sanchez-Eppler argues that
nineteenth-century temperance fiction locates scenes of sal-
vation in the bed of a child who converts the drunken father
into a good, temperate man. "In their stories of redemption
through the love of a child," Sanchez-Eppler elaborates,
"temperance writers have actually crossed . . . two cultural
versions of incest [as a sign of male coercive power and as a
promise of sexually satisfying domestic love] and reimagined
male violence as domestic love." The child is thus figured
both as "victim of abuse and agent of discipline." These texts
fail to name the act of incest or include the reality of violence
and sexual penetration, 63 which, nevertheless, are absent
presences.
The "Ghosting" of Intimate Relationships between Women
But what of Hosmer's lifestyle, which I alluded to earlier?
How is this an absent presence that can be traced? William
Wetmore Story, an American sculptor living in Rome, had his
own nickname for the "white marmorean flock," the group of
American women sculptors living and working in Rome: "the
harem (scarem) . . . [of] emancipated females." 64 For this
Harvard-educated ex-lawyer and son of an associate justice of

the United States Supreme Court, the "strange sisterhood of
American 'lady sculptors' " 65 crossed acceptable boundaries
in their behavior and clothing and above all by having pro-
fessional lives instead of being wives and mothers.
In 1852, Hosmer left Boston to enter the Roman salon of
the American actress Charlotte Cushman. Other members
were Matilda M. Hays, George Sand's translator and one of
Cushman's romantic partners; the American sculptors Emma
Stebbins (a later, long-term partner of Cushman), Margaret
Foley, and Edmonia Lewis; and the American writers Isa
Badgon, Kate Field, and Frances Power Cobbe. 66 Hosmer
lived for a time with Cushman and Hays; later, she inhabited
separate quarters in Cushman and Stebbins's Via Gregoriana
lodgings until 1862, when she finally moved into her own
home.
Some of these women had the sort of sentimental connec-
tions and relationships that the historians Lillian Faderman
and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg define as "romantic friend-
ships" (another term is "Boston marriages"). These were
"socially acceptable and fully compatible with heterosexual
marriage." 67 The friendships ranged "from the supportive
love of sisters, through the enthusiasm of adolescent girls, to
sensual avowals of love by mature women" in a homosocial
realm "in which men made but a shadowy appearance" and
in which the women formed "respectable, and appropriately
domestic" female households "that preserved the appearance
of propriety despite the unconventionality of women living
on their own far from fathers, brothers, or husbands." 68 The
norm was for an older mentor like Cushman to play the "role
of foster mother," supervising "the young girl's deportment,"
monitoring "her health," and introducing her to a "network
of female friends." 69 All this applied to Hosmer. Nineteenth-
century white middle-class women often formed their own
gendered communities out of necessity in a world comprising
discrete male and female spheres, composing a "closed and
intimate female world" in which a young girl like Hosmer
"grew toward womanhood" under the tutelage of an older
woman like Cushman. 70
Yet these intimate friendships and the behavior of these
women troubled Story: "Hatty [Harriet Hosmer's nickname]
takes a high hand here with Rome, and would have the
Romans know that a Yankee girl can do anything she pleases,
walk alone, ride her horse alone, and laugh at their rules." He
feared that this "very willful, and too independent" twenty-
one-year-old was "mixed up with a set whom" he so deplored
that he could do little to assist her career. 71
Other contemporaries commented on Hosmer's uncon-
ventional behavior. The British artist Frederick Leighton de-
scribed her as the "queerest, best-natured little chap possi-
ble," while Bessie Rayner Parkes viewed her as "the funniest
little creature, not at all coarse, rough or slangy, but like a
little boy" who is quite "queer," a term that Nathaniel Haw-
thorne similarly used to describe the young artist. 72 Child
concurred: "In character and manners she was, in fact, just
like a brave, roguish boy." 73 As Kasson observes, these com-
ments served to contain Hosmer's ambition and indepen-
dence within the conventional female characteristics of
quaintness, petite size, vulnerability, and good humor.' 4 But
they also figure her as boyish, identifying her performance of
masculine roles as eccentric.
Hosmer's associates often commented on her dress. Haw-
thorne reported that she "had on a male shirt, collar, and
cravat" when he first entered her studio. 75 Child similarly
noticed that Hosmer combined masculine and feminine cos-
tumes: "Her ample silken skirt was womanly, but the closely-
fitting basque of black velvet was buttoned nearly to the
throat, like a vest, and showed a shirt-bosom and simple linen
collar." Even her manner of moving marked the sculptor as
masculine, Child noted, for she "occasionally thrust her
hands, as boys are wont to do, and carried her spirited head
with a manly air." She moreover "touched the front of her hat
and raised it from her head in gentlemanly fashion." 76
Hosmer was indeed unconventional. Energetic and "boy-
ish" in her behavior and dress, she reveled in Cushman's
"female centered household" of empowered women because
it extended her childhood experiences and proclivities. 77 As
most biographies narrate, Hosmer's mother, sister, and two
brothers died of tuberculosis when Hosmer was young. Her
physician father raised her to participate in outdoor activities
such as hiking, swimming, horseback riding, rowing, skating,
and shooting pistols to maintain her health. She was not
brought up according to middle-class conventions of femi-
nine decorum and deportment; one article notes that she
"scandalized the neighbors by climbing trees." 78 "She had the
character and manners," this article reports, "of a romping
and roguish boy," establishing a precedent for later gender
transgressions in behavior, dress, and career that was nur-
tured by Mrs. Sedgwick's School for Girls. 79 While attending
this school in 1849, she met the British actress Fanny Kemble
and the novelist Catharine M. Sedgwick (the sister of Charles
Sedgwick), who provided role models of female indepen-
dence and professionalism. They, like her patron Wayman
Crow, encouraged Hosmer to pursue a career, resulting in
her decision to become a sculptor. Kemble's notorious di-
vorce, her cross-dressing, and what Herman Melville called
her "unfemininely masculine" nature set a precedent for
Hosmer's subsequent transgressive behaviors in Rome. 80
Story and others may have been taken aback not only by
Hosmer's unconventional behavior and dress but also by her
intimate relationships with other women. The literary critic
Lisa Moore notes "the conflict between approving accounts
of the chastity of these relationships, virulent denunciations
of the dangers of female homosexuality, and self-conscious
representations of homosexual desire by women" that oc-
curred before the terms "lesbian" and "homosexual" were
created. 81 Story certainly saw Cushman and her circle as
aberrant, which inspired his disparaging comments about
them. 82
Story either sensed or knew that Cushman had a ten-year
intimate relationship with Matilda Hays and then a nearly
twenty-year carnal friendship with the sculptor Emma Steb-
bins. 83 According to such scholars as Lisa Merrill, Dolly
Sherwood, and Martha Vicinus (none of whom are art histo-
rians) and Hosmer's own letters, Hosmer herself had inti-
mate sexual relationships with women, including Cornelia
Crow, Hays, Stebbins (prior to Stebbins's relationship with
Cushman), and Louisa, Lady Ashburton. When Hosmer sent
her sculpture Daphne (ca. 1855) to the Crow family, for
example, she advised her former schoolmate Cornelia to "kiss
her lips and then remember that I kissed her just before she
305

306
left me." In late 1854, Hays left Cushman outside London
and moved back to Rome, where she lived with Hosmer for
four months. Eventually, Hays felt so "miserable" and "sor-
rowful" without Cushman that she decided to return to her in
London. Cushman acknowledged that her partner "has tried
others," suggesting that Hays's four-month liaison with Hos-
mer was indeed erotic. Hosmer also had an affair with Cush-
man's future partner Emma Stebbins, informing Wayman
Crow in 1857 that she had "taken onto" herself "a wife in the
form of Miss. Stebbins," and commenting that they were "very
happy together." Hosmer later, in the 1870s, referred to the
widowed Louisa, Lady Ashburton, as her "sposa" and "wed-
ded wife," calling herself Louisa's "hubbie." In another she
promised Lady Ashburton that she will "be a model wife (or
husband whichever you like)." 84 She anticipated in a letter to
Louisa their "Laocooning" and folding her "arms round" her,
while in another she looked forward to Louisa tumbling into
her arms, kissing her, and telling her "how dearly I love
you." 85 In Rome, where these expatriate women could "safely
do many things that would have shocked the sensibilities of a
narrow New England village or British small town," they
reveled in their homosocial and homoerotic lifestyles. 86
Merrill, Cushman's biographer, convincingly demonstrates
through a careful analysis of correspondence that Cushman
created what Eve Sedgwick called the "wider mappings of
secrecy and disclosure, and of the private and the public" that
dictated the terms for understanding lesbian desire before
these terms had been defined in medical texts and court
transcripts. 8 Cushman and her earlier partner Rosalie Sully
burned their letters, although the actress's diaries expressed
their love for one another. 88 Emma Crow Cushman (Wayman
Crow's daughter) was Charlotte's confidante, alleged lover,
and daughter-in-law (Charlotte had arranged the 1861 mar-
riage between the nephew she had adopted as her son, Edwin
Charles Cushman, and Emma). The actress advised Emma
that their letters must be destroyed in case "any unscrupulous
person or persons" read them, which could result in "her
reputation" being "lost forever." 89 Stebbins contributed to
the posthumous sanitizing of Cushman's life by insisting on
writing her lover's biography herself. She sifted through her
own correspondence of a "personal character, which re-
quire[d] careful gleaning" before publication. 90 As Merrill
observes, Stebbins's memoir included letters edited "so that
[the] eroticism evident in the original letters is omitted."
"Harriet Hosmer, with whom Charlotte and Emma Stebbins
lived for years, is only mentioned once," and Sully and Hays
"are omitted entirely." 91 Stebbins thus eliminated informa-
tion about her sexuality and that of her partners, Cushman
and Hosmer. Hosmer, to protect her own reputation, also
"ghosted" her sexuality at a time when "romantic friendships"
were acceptable among women but same-sex desires and
public behaviors were problematic.
Castle argues that in the Western literary imagination,
lesbianism exists primarily as "an absence ... a kind of love
that, by definition, cannot exist," 92 partly because Cushman,
Stebbins, Hosmer, and others in their circle collaborated in
constructing this absence. 93 "Lesbian sexuality," Vicinus elab-
orates, "repeatedly evaporates into denial, concealment, or
displacement. But it also never disappears." 94 Hosmer, ad-
dressing the highly sensitive subject of incest, was drawn to
the contradictions, conflicts, and silences manifested in the
Cenci narrative because of her own unconventional behavior
and lifestyle. In other words, the artist may have been sym-
pathetic to the subject of Beatrice Cenci because her own
sexuality had to be hidden. Hosmer is complicitous with the
ghosting (cultural and sexual constraints force her to be
complicit) of Beatrice Cenci because she is the artist who does
not name or identify—iconographically or otherwise; at the
same time, she is also the object of "ghosting" whose own
lifestyle remains hidden in deference to cultural and sexual
norms. Hosmer's failure to name incest signifies a form of
complicity or subservience to authority, making her a part of
the problem, which she nevertheless attempts to rectify by
exposing how incest is "ghosted" in American culture.
A Feminist Statue
As Gwin observes, recent American fiction and memoirs
about father-daughter incest present stories about "unsuc-
cessful struggle[s] for female agency under patriarchy." 95
Beatrice Cenci represents such a story in which a woman could
not gain female agency under the patriarchal family, state, or
ecclesiastical regime—an ironic choice of subject, given Hos-
mer's success as an artist and an independent woman. Hos-
mer, a professional, single woman who struggled against
nineteenth-century ideas about femininity and female sexu-
ality, repeatedly represented images of wronged yet heroic
women. Hosmer's Medusa (Fig. 2) departs from the norm in
her image of a restrained, calm, and sorrowful face rather
than a tortured vision with writhing serpentine locks. She
becomes both a creator and destroyer in her role as meta-
morphoser who transforms men into stone. Hosmer por-
trayed Zenobia (Fig. 1) as a heroic and majestic queen who
refused to accept the terms of surrender of her besieged city
and who proudly walks in chains despite her defeat. Although
both Medusa and Zenobia, like Beatrice Cenci, are wronged,
they are also, either before or after, powerful.
Hosmer's sculptures underscore her intense and lifelong
feminist beliefs, which became apparent later in life. Al-
though she never realized her ambition to create a memorial
dedicated to Susan B. Anthony, her oeuvre, which includes
Zenobia, Medusa, and Beatrice Cenci, forms such a monument
by celebrating women engaged in "grand act[s]." Within this
context, Hosmer chose the subject of Beatrice Cenci both
because it suggested the ways that her own alternative lifestyle
and sexuality were "ghosted" and because it implies a radical
critique of a society organized on principles of patriarchy.
The sculpture thus makes visible the contradictions between
the Victorian ideal of white middle-class womanhood and the
realities of many women's lives, and it prompts viewers to ask
whether an ideology of purity, submission, and domesticity
really sheltered women from violence, or if it instead pro-
tected the perpetrators of violence. The passivity and resig-
nation of the statue underscore these contradictions; Bea-
trice both submits to and rebels against patriarchal authority.
Hosmer both expressed (in her private letters and in her
relationships with other women) and repressed (in public)
her sexuality in ways that match the expression and repres-
sion of sexuality in her literary sources and in the statue itself.
She selected from Jameson and Shelley the composition of
the woman asleep in what is subtly signified as a prison cell,

epressing other important events narrated in both texts.
And, like these writers, she, too, "ghosts" the topic of incest,
repressing its presence in the sculpture itself. Beatrice's
breast in the statue exemplifies this duality of expression and
repression: the nipple and shape of the breast are clearly
visible but literally covered over by the drapery, so that it is
simultaneously present and absent. The very pose of Beatrice,
reclining and almost collapsing into itself, signifies repres-
sion—of one's own sexuality around a raping father and, by
extension, of one's alternative sexuality within nineteenth-
century culture. (It also alludes to the repression of the
Church, which condemned Beatrice to death.) The marble
itself embodies these problems of expression and repression,
for although white, it is flawed in some areas with black veins.
Like veins in a body, these dark lines mark the interiority of
the body (what is underneath the skin), which can be seen
but is covered. Like the breast, then, this insinuates both
eroticism and the erasure of eroticism: both the expression
and repression of sexuality that match the absent presence,
or "ghosting," of incest in Hosmer's statue and her literary
sources, as well as in the artist's same-sex relationships.
Hosmer, like other nineteenth-century writers and critics
discussed in this essay, evoked the incest taboo but never
explicitly addressed it, precisely because it was a taboo. The
underlying cultural values articulated, for example, in the
laws of patriarchal society diminished to some extent for the
wider society the horror that incest connoted for its victims.
In one reading, Beatrice Cenci, in fact, is an autonomous
female analogous to the independent artist, Hosmer, who
exposed the ways in which incest was "ghosted" in American
culture, underscoring Victorian Americans' anxieties over
female sexuality. Her sculptural profession, dress, "mannish"
mannerisms, unconventional behavior (such as riding a
horse unescorted in public), and her alternative sexuality
created a social identity that enabled Hosmer to relate to the
subject of her statue—a patricide whose actions, like Hos-
mer's, rejected patriarchy. Beatrice Cenci thus constitutes a
feminist artwork that incorporates important aspects of the
nineteenth-century wave of feminism and the uneasiness that
Victorian Americans felt over the subject of incest.
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