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

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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 professional 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 friendships" (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 unconventional 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 comments 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 "boyish" 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 feminine 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 historians) and Hosmer's own letters, Hosmer herself had intimate 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 "sorrowful" 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 marriage 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 sexuality, 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,
Page 1 and 2: The "Ghosting" of Incest and Female
Page 3 and 4: 294 ing role in reading the narrati
Page 5 and 6: 296 Appropriate and popular sculptu
Page 7 and 8: 298 dramatic potential of the story
Page 9 and 10: 300 empty because the chain is repl
Page 11 and 12: 302 One look, one smile." (Wildly.)
Page 13: 304 mer's sympathy with this femini
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of Incest and Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci

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