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

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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 authority. 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 victimizer. 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- 293
294 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 paradoxes 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 discretion. 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,
Page 1: The "Ghosting" of Incest and Female
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 and 14: 304 mer's sympathy with this femini
Page 15 and 16: 306 left me." In late 1854, Hays le
Page 17 and 18: 308

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

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