Hawthorne, Sculpture, and the Question of American Art

Deanna Fernie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351931540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Deanna Fernie analyzes the significance of sculpture in Hawthorne's fiction through the recurring motif of the fragment in its double guise as ruin and project. Her book casts new light on Hawthorne's memorable ruined and unfinished images, from the rough-hewn figurehead of 'Drowne's Wooden Image' (1844) to the tattered letter 'A' in the unfinished loft of the Custom House in The Scarlet Letter (1850) and the unfinished bust of Donatello in The Marble Faun (1860). Fernie shows how the tension between the formed and unformed enabled Hawthorne to interrogate the origins and the distinctive possibilities of art in America in relation to established European models. At the same time, she suggests that sculpture challenged and provoked Hawthorne's shaping of his own specifically literary art, stimulating him to develop its capacities for expressing irresolution and change. Fernie establishes the intellectual contexts for her study through a discussion of sculpture and fragmentary form as revealed in American, British, and Continental thought. Her book will be an important text not only for American literature scholars but also for anyone interested in British and Continental Romanticism and the intersections of art and literature.

Chapter 1
American Laokoon

[Sculpture] was originally a useful art, a mode of writing.¹

The American forester should make a different carving of a wood god from an Italian’s work.²

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The room lined with rows of ideal sculpture in Hawthorne’s “A Select Party” might have been inspired by the sculpture gallery of the Boston Athenaeum (Fig. 1.1). Among the Athenaeum’s large collection of antique casts was the sculptural group of Laocoon and his sons (Fig. 1.2), itself a Roman copy of a Greek original and one of the first ancient sculptures to be exhibited as a plaster copy in the United States.

Fig. 1.1 Statuary Room of the Athenaeum, Boston, 1855. Boston Athenaeum.

Laocoon was not only a touchstone of excellence in sculpture but, like other famous antique works, was seen to embody the values of classical civilization. Johann Joachim Winckelmann had pronounced in 1755, “The only way for us to become great or, if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients.”³ Winckelmann understood “imitate” in the classical sense of “capturing the essence”—not replicating ancient art, but creating something in its spirit, and perhaps ultimately uniquely so, by which he introduces the paradoxical idea of inimitable imitation. The statue of Laocoon represented the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” (“edle Einfalt, stille Grösse”)⁴ that Winckelmann saw as the defining qualities of the ancient Greeks.

In Laokoon (1766), Gottholf Ephraim Lessing follows Winckelmann in attributing the physical and moral beauty of the ancient Greeks to their civic sculpture; beholding these grand images, the Greeks had imitated and internalized the qualities embodied in the statues to grow in their image:

The plastic arts in particular, beyond the unfailing influence they exert on the character of a nation, are capable of an effect that demands the close supervision of the law. When beautiful men fashioned beautiful statues, these in their turn affected them, and the state had beautiful statues in part to thank for beautiful citizens.⁵

The passage asserts sculpture’s peculiar, almost magical, power to influence its beholders, but that this “demands the close supervision of the law” hints at the moral and the political dangers of statues which were in any way degenerate. For Lessing, that degeneracy—and he ends the passage with the thought that the artistic imagination of his day “appears to express itself only in monsters”—arose from the way that modern literature, painting and sculpture had blurred the boundaries that defined them as distinct disciplines. Under the concept of the Sister Arts and Horace’s maxim, ut pictura poesis, writers had created a “speaking picture,” while painters and sculptors had made their art into “a silent poem without considering in what measure she can express general concepts and not at the same time depart from her vocation and become a freakish⁶ kind of writing” (Lessing, 4). The representation of Laocoon in sculpture and literature inaugurates Lessing’s assessment of “the limits of painting and poetry,” the sub-title of his work, in his attempt to restore the pure aims of the classical art forms.

Nowhere was the desire for the virtuous impact of beautiful statues upon its people more visible than in the newly formed United States of America. The nation’s political need to be identified with the origins of democracy was reflected aesthetically in its emulation of classical art and architecture. In 1813, for example, the young Samuel B. Morse exhibited two different works on the subject of the “Dying Hercules,” the first a small bronze reminiscent of the Dying Gladiator, the other a huge canvas whose contorted figures directly echoed the Laocoon group. In 1841, Horatio Greenough’s colossal white marble statue of George Washington, modeled on the Phydian Zeus at Olympia, was installed in the Rotunda. Among Greenough’s figures for the pediment of the Senate was The Rescue (Fig. 1.3), completed by Greenough in 1850 but assembled by the architect Richard Mills in 1852 after the sculptor’s death. In this narrative group, a colossal frontiersman defends a woman and child from a Native American who stands well below the giant figure of the white man. The woman and child, smaller in size again and hunched on the ground, stand to one side while from the other a dog looks on. The frontiersman looks to be easily disarming the Native American, yet the group, with its representation of mortal struggle and its triangular formation (emphasized by the undulating folds of the frontiersman’s cloak and the angle of the hatchet), is reminiscent of Laocoon and the “pyramidal” formation so admired by Winckelmann and Lessing.⁷

The American emulation of classical works such as Laocoon has ramifications, however, beyond the recasting of the classical image with an American theme. There is also, among writers such as Hawthorne and Emerson, an American “Laokoon,” a reprising of Lessing’s complaint in his Laokoon of the direction sculpture had taken, but with a distinctly American twist that challenges the unquestioned imitation of classical sculpture. In “Art” (1841), Emerson denies sculpture a role in the new democracy, while in “The Birth-mark” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” Hawthorne critiques the cultural preponderance of white ideal sculpture. Emerson may in part have been reacting to the incongruity of classical representations of modern Americans. Greenough’s George Washington, for example, followed neoclassical practice by cladding the president in a toga (though, on seeing Powers’s Washington, Hawthorne scoffed at the sculptor’s frustration of having to show the president clothed, upholding the need to use “the drapery of the day” rather than classical dress).⁸ The ill-fated statue was moved from under the Rotunda, because of poor light conditions, to a specially constructed shelter, but its appearance under this makeshift rain cover led to its being ridiculed until it was eventually housed in the Smithsonian Institute. When American sculpture deviated from classical subjects, as “non-public” sculpture increasingly did during the 1840s and 1850s by taking its themes from literature and history rather than representing pure “idea,” it earned its practitioners the title of “literary sculptors,” as Margaret Farrand Thorp notes in her study of this group of artists⁹—a title that might have convinced Lessing that sculpture had indeed exceeded its limits.

Fig. 1.2 Laocoon (c. AD 50). ALINARI Archives, Florence.

Fig. 1.3 The Rescue, Horatio Greenough, 1850. Courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol.

In reviewing the direction American sculpture took during the nineteenth century, this chapter will examine how Hawthorne and his contemporaries responded to sculpture, not only in direct criticism such as Emerson’s “Art,” which provides an important context for Hawthorne’s fictional critiques, but imaginatively and implicitly in their literary works through sculptural allusions and metaphors, for which I also find examples in Melville and Whitman. In evoking sculptural images in their essays, fiction and poetry, these writers draw on the power of the visual arts for their writing. By doing so, they were also engaging in the very practices to which Lessing objects in his Laokoon, insofar as they create a “speaking picture” in words. But in their own American “Laokoon,” these writers implicitly perform an act of judgment on sculpture’s efficacy in relation to writing. Simply bringing two art forms together makes them naturally vie with one another, and Hawthorne’s stories about art always imply some level of paragone between writing and the other art form.

The passages I discuss are examples of ekphrasis, the classical rhetorical art of description, and more specifically, the description of a work of art.¹⁰ In Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, Murray Krieger presents a historical view of how writers have sought both to emulate the immediacy of art (with sculpture as the most “natural” art form, in that it is the physical embodiment of what it represents), and to assert the distinctive way “language, in the vagueness, the unpredictability—but also the suggestiveness—that emanates from its arbitrary signs, can have a virtually unlimited emotional appeal” (Krieger, 24–6). Edmund Burke is quoted later in the discussion: “So far is a clearness of imagery from being absolutely necessary to an influence upon the passions, that they may be considerably operated upon without presenting any image at all.”¹¹ The American writers understand—supremely—the emotive and visual power of language, and we will see how Hawthorne asserts its suggestive power over the other art forms he invokes. (And this might explain why, when we come to his actual descriptions of works of art in The French and Italian Notebooks and The Marble Faun, these seem flat in comparison to the allusiveness of the less obviously ekphrastic passages of his earlier fiction.) Yet in the ekphrastic examples I look at, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and Whitman are not simply using language to create a vivid picture but to comment on particular artistic practices, often to make a wider point. Ekphrasis tends to throw cultural values into question because writing unfixes and destabilizes the givenness of established forms. The work of W.J.T. Mitchell has demonstrated that ekphrasis always involves value judgments and that these can be political in nature, as my examples from Melville and Whitman will show. Ekphrasis can also be emotionally inflected. Grant F. Scott, in his study of Keats and the visual arts, writes that ekphrasis summons up a “whole host of psychological issues that have less to do with aesthetics than with anxieties”—anxieties over issues such as cultural heritage, poetic tradition and gender.¹² Scott sees Keats’s sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time,” a poem I discuss in chapter 2 for its fragmentary subject and form, as a troubled response to the cultural expectations presented by the ancient works of art. For American authors too, cultural heritage and literary traditions were bound up with aesthetic and even political choices, as this chapter aims to show.

In bringing together writing and sculpture in his stories, Hawthorne was capitalizing on the recent flourishing of sculpture in the United States to borrow some of its prestige for his less esteemed trade of writing Romance fiction. Plaster casts of classical, Renaissance, and neoclassical sculpture had for several decades populated galleries such as the Athenaeum, making such works familiar to city-goers. Many who traveled to Europe purchased small copies of famous ancient statues to display in their homes. Even Melville and Hawthorne acquired copies of antique busts of Antinous, and Hawthorne also had one of Apollo.¹³ With the arrival of marble works carved by American sculptors, a new excitement surrounded gallery-viewing. The Boston Athenauem’s 1831 exhibition of Horatio Greenough’s Chanting Cherubs created a buzz around sculpture. The Boston Evening Gazette prompts its readers, somewhat whimsically and perhaps tongue-in-cheek, to catch the cherubs while they can:

CHAUNTING CHERUBS [sic]. Those of our readers who have not yet paid their devoirs to this inimitable Group, are advised to improve an early opportunity. The exhibition closes on the 1st of June, when the Cherubim will wing their flight to New York, never to return.¹⁴

The advertisement states that viewing hours had been extended to include an evening session to cope with demand. Thorp relates that some viewers were disappointed to find the cherubs didn’t actually chant (Thorp, 114), giving a measure of the level of expectation surrounding the exhibition and bearing out Lessing’s fear of sculpture’s degradation to spectacle. Was there a note of derision in the epithet “inimitable,” or had Greenough achieved an inimitable imitation in his group? In any case, this event’s reception reveals a complex of attitudes—anticipation, excitement, reverence and irreverence—surrounding the exhibition of sculpture in America at this date.

The year before Hawthorne wrote “A Select Party,” Hiram Powers had carved his Greek Slave (1843), the statue that was to become the most well-known and popular work of its kind. Like Greenough’s heroic works, The Greek Slave was based on classical models, in this case the Venus de Cnidus. When the work went on tour in the United States in 1847–48 it was widely celebrated, as the etching from the Düsseldorf Gallery in New York suggests (Fig. 1.4). By the end of the 1840s, Powers had made four replicas selling at $4,000 apiece; he would make a total of six replicas in his lifetime. Small models of the statue in Parian plaster, so-called after the marble of that name, were manufactured in England by Summerly’s and sold for two guineas (Thorp, 73). Many were purchased by Americans, extending the presence of contemporary ideal sculpture from the public galleries to the privacy of the parlor. The newly formed Art Unions sent out miniature copies of other American sculptures to their members. By the 1860s, John Roger’s plaster groups of scenes of town life made such sculpture affordable to the public at large.

From its inception as a fine art form in the early nineteenth century, American sculpture could be said to epitomize the problem of imitation and originality that Emerson addresses in his lectures. In “Self-Reliance,” which appeared with “Art” in Essays: First Series, he pronounces that “imitation is suicide” (Whicher, 148), and sculpture must have appeared an egregious example. Much of American sculpture was created in direct imitation of classical and neoclassical models, made in Europe, and in its early days it was even made with imitation materials. The sculptor Erastus Dowe Palmer presents a rare exception to the artistic exodus to Rome. Some of the statues adorning national monuments adopted European iconography: the frontiersman of The Rescue and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Chiseling Pen
• 1 American Laokoon
• 2 Ruin or Project?
• 3 An American Michelangelo
• 4 The Shattered Fountain
• 5 Donatello’s Bust
• Epilogue: Sculpting America
• Works Cited
• Index