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

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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 veining), 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 nineteenth-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 composition displays restraint and containment. Beatrice's long hair and headdress (copied from Reni's portrait), with its horizontal 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." 29 299
300 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 imprisonment (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.
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: 298 dramatic potential of the story
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
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