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

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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