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

Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) belonged to that group of expatriate American women sculptors in Rome whom Henry James dubbed "a white marmorean flock."1 These artists, like their male counterparts, created idealized Neoclassical works that immortalized didactic narratives and moral concepts in stone. Hosmer diverged from her colleagues of both sexes, however, by specializing in studies of heroic women whose deprivation, victimization, captivity, and/or impending death ultimately rendered them sympathetic.2 During her time in Rome, Hosmer produced several major works depicting such wronged historical or mythological females: Zenobia (1859, Fig. 1), the third-century queen of Palmyra captured by the Romans; Medusa (1854, Fig. 2), the woman of ravishing beauty turned into a monster by the jealous Athena; and Beatrice Cenci (1853-55, Fig. 9), a sixteenth-century Italian woman condemned to death by the Church for patricide, even though the father she killed had raped her. I focus primarily on the latter sculpture, derived in part from Percy Bysshe Shelley`s verse play The Cenci (1819), which told the story of "national and universal interest," "incestuous passion," and "cruelty and violence." Beatrice Cenci, "after long and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind," plotted with her stepmother, Lucretia, and her brother Giacomo to murder "their common tyrant"-Count Francesco Cenci. The Church accused, tortured, tried, and condemned all three, executing them in public on September 11, 1599.3

Viewed within the context of mid-nineteenth-century attitudes toward gender and sexuality, Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci reveals that the artist recognized ways in which texts about Beatrice Cenci "ghosted" her status as a victim of incestual rape. The sculpture`s subject, patricide in retaliation for incest, as well as Cenci`s heroism in light of her punishment, intersects with the artist`s unconventional lifestyle and sexuality. These two subjects-intimate female relationships and patricide in retaliation for incestual rape-may seem to be separate strands. They form, however, a complex web, a nexus, that derives from society`s containment and condemnation of sexuality, Hosmer`s interest in unconventional behavior about normative sexuality, Cenci`s radical striking back against patriarchal oppression in the form of her raping father, and the nineteenth-century women`s movement, which centered on suffrage but also was concerned with altering the power relations between men and women. A "conspiracy of silence," as it were, infects both Hosmer`s subject for the statue and her personal position; her covert handling of the incest theme is related to the covertness of her own identity and sexuality, and her nonnormative sexuality gave her a vantage point from which to consider another type of nonnormative sexuality: incest. Although some might not consider incest a form of sexuality, it is so for an incest survivor as well as the rapist, albeit perverse, illegal, and scarring for the victim.

Hosmer`s sexuality and Cenci`s murder of her father both imply a radical critique of patriarchal culture. Hosmer`s life, the sculpture itself, and the literary sources for the sculpture all converge in the expression and repression of unconventional sexualities in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century. Hosmer is the object of patriarchal culture`s disapproval, because of her lifestyle and sexuality, at the same time that she critiques that culture as an artist by choosing a model of problematic sexuality and retaliation for rape and incest.

In using the term "ghosting" to discuss incest, I borrow from Terry Castle, who asserts that same-sex female relationships have "been `ghosted`-or made to seem invisible-by culture itself." It is a taboo, an "insidious and ascetical kind of denial" that results in "a silenced lesbian past."4 I apply the term to Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci, through which the artist addressed another sexual taboo: incest. Clearly, consensual love between partners of the same or opposite sex is not the same kind of "love" that exists in a parent-child incestual relationship. "Love" in the latter case is complicated on many levels, reflecting the parent`s control and power over the child, the child`s lack of consent (or, especially on the part of a younger child, the adult`s coercion of that consent), and the child`s confusion, fear, shame, and self-hatred. The perpetrator`s "love" is also complex, involving both narcissistic self-love and self-loathing. In arguing that Hosmer "ghosts" same-sex relationships in her life and incest in Beatrice Cenci, I am not equating these two sexualities; it is Hosmer`s emotional and sexual life that, like the sexual violence at the heart of the story of Beatrice Cenci, is "ghosted."

I believe that Beatrice Cenci constitutes a "ghosted" incest narrative in a covert and sublimated form. Exposing and analyzing this subject will serve to reinsert into American discourse a subject that is "both [a] product and source of textual [and visual] anxiety, contradiction, or censorship" in American culture,5 one that needed to be suppressed during a period dominated by the Victorian "conspiracy of silence" regarding sexuality. (In fact, the incest narrative did not fully and clearly enter American discourse until the 1970s.)6 Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci reiterates the "structuring absence" of incest within nineteenth-century American culture to which other artists and writers adhered, both suppressing and expressing this taboo subject.7

As Michel Foucault observes in The History of Sexuality, "silence itself-the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name ... is less the absolute limit of discourse .. . than an element that functions alongside the things said." These many "silences," Foucault maintains, "are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses."8 Foucault proposes that homosexuality, emerging in the 1880s, makes these silences palpable, creating a subject "marked," according to the art historian Richard Meyer, "by erasures and ellipses, by secrets and structuring absences."9 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 mention," "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 revelation 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."" 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 patricide 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 Lucrebia, Fig. 3), or one in which she murders her father (a version of Artemisia Gentileschi`s Judth 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 iconographie 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 Barberini in Rome.12 Herman Melville earlier had used Beatrice Onci as a leitmotif for brother-sister incest in Pierre, or The Ambiguities (1852). Whereas Hawthorne never clearly identifies the horrors of Cenci`s biography (nor that of his character 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 humanity-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 Onci 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 unspeakable narrative.15 Presumably, the same was true of Hosmer`s statue.

Hawthorne articulates the viewer`s necessary yet challenging role in reading the narrative of Hosmer`s statue. Nineteenth-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, daughter 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 challenged male authority in religion through her involvement with Spiritualism, as the art historian Charles Colbert argues,18 for this work she selected a subject that broaches the ambiguity, denial, and horror that many Americans experienced 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 Mercantile 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, Hosmer befriended Cornelia Crow, who would become a lifetime friend, confidante, and an important link to her father, Wayman Crow, with whom Hosmer first became acquainted while visiting the family in 1850. A dry-goods merchant. Crow was a civic-minded citizen and politician involved in many public and private organizations. He was president of the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce for ten years, served two terms in the Missouri State Senate, secured in 1846 the charter for the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association (the city`s first public library), and in 1853 founded the Eliot Seminary, which three years later became Washington University. He also provided this educational institution with an art school and the first art museum west of the Mississippi River.

Crow quickly became the young sculptor`s first benefactor, advocate, patron, and mentor. He persuaded Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell of the Missouri Medical College to tutor Hosmer in anatomy, since she could not take classes in the all-male medical school. When Hosiner`s father withdrew his financial support in January 1854 because of money problems, Crow provided funds, "setting her up," as she wrote appreciatively, "as an artist." The following year. Crow commissioned her first full-length, life-size figure, Oenone (ca. 1855). Six years later, he secured for her the state commission to create a bronze statue of Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Crow and Hosmer corresponded until his death in 1885, Hosmer signing her letters "your affectionate daughter," invoking "a personal, familial relationship to explain a professional connection."19

Besides furthering her education, commissioning works of art, and financing her career, Crow also persuaded Alfred Vinton, chairman of the board of directors and former president of the St. Louis Mercantile Library, to commission a statue from Hosmer for that institution, the oldest library west of the Mississippi River.20 The subject Hosmer selected does not celebrate western expansion, as one might expect. Appropriate and popular sculptural subjects would have been a captive Indian woman (in the vein of Erastus Dow Palmer, The White Captive, 1858-59, Fig. 5), the ignoble and "savage" native (Horatio Greenough, Rescue, 1837-53, Fig. 6), the disappearing Native American race (Thomas Crawford, The Indian: Dying Chief, 1856, Fig. 7), or a historical Indian figure (Joseph Mozier, Pocahontas, 1877, Fig. 8). Hosmer, who had previously treated heroic women in a mythological and classical context, would have had to depart from the content of her oeuvre to produce such an Indian figure or white captive.

Instead, she selected a subject from Italian history that would help to bring high culture to St. Louis, a city she claimed to love because "it was there I first began my studies" and because of the "many generous and indulgent friends who .. . ministered to the growth of the Arts and Sciences."21 Cenci`s whiteness, manifest in the statue`s white marble, which nevertheless has some dark veins, is consistent with the library`s raison d`être-westward expansion-for its color signifies Euro-American settlers in opposition to dark-skinned Native Americans. Although the racial Other is absent, the statue`s very whiteness signifies this other absent presence. It is thus ironic that her patron both supported and was a part of the white patriarchy that Hosmer critiques through her statue.

It may be that obtaining the commission for this statue through her "second father," Wayman Crow, made her uneasy, either because of Crow`s reach into her life or her natural father`s abandonment of her. The choice of a subject connected with incest and patricide, for a sculpture made possible by a father figure, may be significant. Could this statue be also an allegory about good fathers and bad fathers? And one of possibly larger civic implications (that is, Crow as a benign and responsible civic figure, a good father to his surrogate daughter as well as to the city of St. Louis, versus the evil father Cenci, a rogue and a tyrant, and the ultimate bad father)?

Hosmer was a shrewd businesswoman who realized that her subject would appeal to Americans who had been on the grand tour, as well as to the literary and artistic expatriate crowd in Rome and those who would see the statue at the Royal Academy in London. These viewers most certainly would have been familiar with the sixteenth-century Italian woman`s life through Reni`s painting, a popular tourist attraction for Americans on the grand tour. As the statue traveled on exhibition to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, it would also be seen by readers of Shelley`s The Cenci, considered by William Wordsworth to be "the greatest tragedy of the age" (and a text owned by the St. Louis Mercantile Library22), and Anna Jameson`s Lives of Celebrated Female Smierrigns (1831), which includes a chapter on Beatrice Cenci. These two texts, in tact, inspired Hosmer to represent the subject in marble.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Anna Jameson, and Harriet Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci

In Hosmer`s sculpture (Fig. 9), Cenci`s slumbering pose embodies, according to Colbert, "an exemplary display of composure in the face of death." Colbert, who argues that Hosmer was a Spiritualist, sees in Bealrice Cenci the Spiritualist belief that dreams and visions make possible personal communication with the supernatural.23 He identifies Shelley`s The Cenci as Hosmer`s source, using as evidence the following passage: "I was just dreaming / That we were all in Paradise" (5.3.9-10). Beatrice, according to Shelley`s verse drama, retains her faith in an afterlife despite her condemnation by the Church. More significant, however, are the subsequent words she utters: "Thou knowest / This cell seems like a kind of Paradise / After our father`s presence" (5.3.11-12). Clearly, the dungeon both prefigures the "paradise" she hopes to experience in death and functions as a protective shell that excludes others, especially her father. With the perpetrator dead by her own hand, Cenci feels safe finally in this hermetically sealed space, both prison and safe haven.

Shelley provided the general outline of the Cenci family history with slight variations that would have been familiar to Hosmer, Hawthorne, and Melville. The poet recognized the dramatic potential of the story about the noble and rich Count Cenci, who had been convicted by the pope three times because of misdeeds that involved sodomy, according to Shelley`s documentary source, or the plotted murder of his two sons, according to Shelley`s retelling of the story. This cruel father, the poet explains, celebrated the death of his two sons with a banquet and imprisoned, abused, and raped his daughter, who was subsequently tried and beheaded by the Church.24 Only the youngest son, Bernardo, survived. Thus was extinguished the power of one of the noblest and richest families in Rome.

Jameson narrated a similar account in Lives of Celebrated Female Sovereigns. Hosmer consulted Jameson from 1857 to 1859 while working on her Zenobia, but the two women probably met earlier, in 1855, while the sculptor was formulating the details for Beatrice Cenci.25 Jameson`s dramatic account similarly constructs Cenci`s father as a "human monster" who "was a stranger to every redeeming virtue of the human heart." She elaborates that Count Cenci spent his life in "debauchery" and mistreated his children, imprisoning Beatrice "in a remote and unfrequented room of his palace." Eventually subdued by her "matchless beauty," the count treated her with greater kindness in preparation for his seduction. Jameson agrees that Beatrice, Lucretia, Giacomo, and one of Beatrice`s suitors (Monsignore Guerra) collaborated in killing Francesco. After their arrest, all confessed except Beatrice, who withstood the rack, and Guerra, who fled the country. Beatrice finally acquiesced, admitting participation in her father`s murder in order to erase the "foul stain" he had cast on their "ancient and honorable house." Pope Clement VIII condemned the family to public beheading.

Shelley`s and Jameson`s stories thus roughly concur, providing Hosmer with the basis for her conception. The sculptor selected one scene from Jameson`s dramatic narrative: Beatrice`s steadfast faith while in prison. Jameson recounts that at the "fatal hour" of Beatrice`s execution, she was in prison "at [her] prayers . . . firm and resolute." Holding a crucifix in one hand with her arms "lightly bound with cords," Beatrice walked to the scaffold with "an expression of resignation and fortitude, a calmness of religious hope," in preparation for her execution.26 Hosmer collapsed two of Jameson`s scenes into one-Beatrice in prison, Beatrice holding a crucifix as she walks to the scaffold-showing instead the condemned woman reclining lethargically on a bench in her cell and grasping a rosary in her sleep.

Jameson`s text never mentions the word "incest" or specifies the horrible "crimes" that led to Beatrice`s death. She instead employs such phrases as "unhallowed crime," "human depravity," "frightful catastrophe," "violent scene," and a "circumstance between Beatrice and her father" that was "monstrous." Jameson furthermore describes Beatrice`s terror as she "shrank back in horror and affright, her features convulsed 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 contours; smooth, highly polished surfaces (except for the roughly textured bench, which emphasizes the harshness of the prison cell); an idealized body clothed in timeless draperies; and a single viewing point. Neoclassical sculpture is typically white, as ancient sculptures were then thought to be, but the whiteness of Beatrice Onri 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 contradictions that this viewer noted, representing Cend`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 racialized 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 Bentrice 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 appeal`s 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

A boll on the statue`s base with an empty loop attached to it is the only visual clue to Cenci`s location in a prison, but the fact that she is not "chained" to it indicates her emotional immobility (she will not flee) and her true innocence. An imaginary line visually connects two objects on the same plane at the base of the statue: the manacle and the cross-one round, the other composed of perpendicular lines; one standing for imprisonment, the other for release from earthly prisons, be they literal, emotional, or faith-based. Beatrice remains linked to the rosary, with its promise of salvation, but the absent chain metaphorically keeps her enclosed in her emotional, physical, and spiritual space. The manacle ring is 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), located 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 Beatrice`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.

The statue contains no overt or clear reference, however, to the events that led to Beatrice`s incarceration. Her exposed breast, elevated buttocks, sinuous curves, and almost transparent drapery evoke the subject`s sexuality, but it appears subdued and restrained in comparison to other, more eroticized nineteenth-century Neoclassical sculptures, such as Hiram Powers`s Greek Slave (1841-47, Fig. 11) or Edward Augustus Bracken`s Shipwrecked Mother and Child (1850-51, Fig. 12). Moreover, the closed pose and clothed body deny the masculine gaze of desire, while her closed eyes evade agency over her sexuality. Nevertheless, the exposed breast with visible nipple, echoed by the point of the pillow, marks her as a desirable woman. The right leg is pulled in, resting on the jail block and expressing the confinement of jail. Her upper torso and head rest on the soft, indented pillow, offering ultimate release in sleep or death. The head furthermore embodies the intellect, which will be severed from the site of her sexuality-the body.

Hosmer`s statue fails to register anything that signifies rape, an absence reiterated by reviews of the statue. The Art-Journal, for example, summarized the story of Beatrice Cenci in 1857. "Her history was most unhappy," the anonymous author notes. She had been "condemned to an ignominious death," and yet she "entertained hopes for a pardon." Hosmer "has represented the unfortunate prisoner" at the moment when she was "peacefully and calmly asleep in her miserable cell," holding in one hand a rosary, "which the fingers, in a state of inaction, refuse to grasp." Critiquing the face as "not as pleasing as we think it might have been made," with a sharp nose and a "rigid expression of the lips," the author reasons that such "peculiariu`es" adhere to the subject`s tragic circumstances.32 The author of this article agrees with Child that Cenci`s face is not entirely untroubled, viewing its unpleasant features as signifying her torment and cold heart ("And yet my heart is cold," she acknowledges in Shelley`s play, 5.4.89). Another contemporary assessment in the Crayon similarly alludes to but does not name the circumstances that brought Beatrice Cenci to her prison bed. "The story of Beatrice Cenci is well known," this author maintains, alluding to her crime of "parricide," which was "justifiable, if the law of nature warrants self-preservation."33

Shelley`s preface to The Cenci, as we have seen, identifies "incestuous passion," cruelty, and violence as among the many misdeeds of Count Cenci. Although he specifies the crime of parricide six times in his verse drama, he never once uses the word "incest," perhaps deliberately. Even so, the play`s rebarbative content and controversial subject matter were understood by the public, delaying its first performance unu`l 1886, and even that was a private production sponsored by the Shelley Society. No public production took place until 1922, after the Lord Chamberlain had modified the censorship laws in Great Britain. According to critics of this play, Shelley`s primary offense lay in his themes of incest and patricide.34

Shelley alludes to but never articulates what led to the count`s murder. In the first act, for example, Count Cenci demands that a servant bring Beatrice to his chamber "at midnight and alone" (1.1.145-46). The following day her pale demeanor, trembling body, and "cold melancholy look" (2.1.29, 51) prompt Lurretia`s queries about what ensued the previous night. Beatrice replies:

Shelley never identifies that "one word." Did Count Cenci acknowledge his role in his two sons` deaths, which he had celebrated at the banquet the previous evening? Did he express or act on his desire to have sex with his daughter-for why else would he command his servant to bring her to his chamber at midnight after the banquet? Or was it that, as Beatrice claims, "he only struck and cursed me as he passed" (2.1.75)? Whatever happened, Lucretia became aware of her stepdaughter`s sadness and fear. By the third act, Beatrice`s confused, disheveled, and fearful demeanor and veiled hints signify her rape, but she cannot name the act. Beatrice staggers and "speaks wildly" at the opening of the third act, feeling "choked" by "a clinging, black, contaminating mist" that "glues" her "fingers" and her "limbs to one another, / And eats into" her "sinews, and dissolves" her "flesh to a pollution, poisoning / The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life!" (3.1.16-23). Her limbs are petrified, her heart weary because of "such a deed /As ..." (3.1.55-56). The ellipses in the text significantly mark the location of the word omitted. The erased deed-incest-cannot be named, leaving the signifier absent, although the reader can infer what is signified, marking the "erasures and ellipses . . . secrets and structuring absences" that Foucault and Meyer identified as signifying "both ignorance and knowledge." Prohibition exists against speech, but not against wild behavior. "If I try to speak / I shall go mad" (3.1.85-86), Beatrice frets, alluding to but not specifying "The thing that I have suffered.... the crime, and punishment" (3.1.88, 98). Beatrice cannot allow herself to remember or name what she experienced with her father.

Yet she remembers, but cannot name, what she "endured," "a wrong" that remains "expressionless" (3.1.213-14). Shelley denotes this unexpressed act as a "deed" (3.1.55, 141), an "outrage" (3.1.348), or "some bitter wrong" (3.1.103, 213), which by the end of the play becomes a "wound" to more clearly demarcate the physical violation of Beatrice`s body (5.2.126). The word "incest" remains unspeakable and unnamable throughout the play, signifying an absent presence whose traces are always evident.

The Conspiracy of Silence and Trauma of Incest

Shelley`s play departs from the norm in Romantic literature, where "father-daughter incest is almost always portrayed as an act of sexual seduction and therefore `normalized` as an obvious extension of heterosexual practice" in which male sexuality is tied to dominance and violence.35 Rather than presenting a seduction scene, Shelley instead accurately and sympathetically captures an incest victim`s confused, panicked, fearful, anguished, and guilt-ridden sense of shame and embarrassment in response to experiences of domestic sexual violence. Beatrice`s panic attacks are "aftereffects of incest," which Shelley may have recognized because of his wife`s experiences. If one accepts a recent scholarly interpretation, Mary Shelley suffered from severe depression-sparked or exacerbated by the recent death of her two children-during the late summer of 1819 while she was writing Mathilda.36 Rosaria Champagne posits that Mary Shelley used Mathilda to "concretize the aftereffects of incest that she herself experienced." Her father, William Godwin, interfered with the book`s publication because of its revealing content (he refused to return Mary`s only copy, so that the book could not be published until 1959).37 Beatrice`s inability to speak out, her silence, is also characteristic of incest victims. This is something else Percy Shelley would have understood from his wife`s silence, for it is only in hindsight that Champagne, a feminist literary scholar, has inferred Mary`s incestual relationship with her father through careful readings of her diaries, letters, and novels. Hosmer`s statue similarly embodies this silence, for the statue cannot speak the reason for its sadness, isolation, and condemnation, nor does it contain any clear reference to incest or rape.

Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci employs the same device of "ghosting" found in Shelley`s play, Jameson`s history, and Hawthorne`s The Marble Faun, for all four texts "`tell` without telling," underscoring "the difficulties in fully apprehending an experience that has not been consciously processed." As Elizabeth Barnes notes, the function of literature, in terms of incest, "provides both a means for the displacement of traumatic experience onto myth, stories, and so forth," and "a means for its realization, through witnessing of trauma by listeners/readers," and, of course, viewers. Barnes continues, "Though historical evidence of an event may be in abundance, no real knowledge of it exists until the event is `witnessed`-that is, until someone has become cognizant of it."38 As Dori Laub elaborates, "The testimony of the trauma thus includes its [listener/reader/viewer], who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time."39 The trauma of incest is ultimately inscribed on Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci, allowing the viewer who is familiar with the story to understand its complex layers of meaning and thereby to witness and acknowledge its existence.

These texts address another type of silence: the Victorian "conspiracy of silence" as a means to control and limit sexuality.40 The white marble in Hosmer`s statue thus underscores the purity demanded by the dominant ideology of the "Cult of True (White) Womanhood," a term historians have used to describe the promotion of domestic virtue among middle-class white American women, arguing that they were confined to the domestic sphere and expected to be virtuous, expressing the prevailing medical belief that a respectable woman could not feel sexual passion.41 The statue`s reclining pose indicates submissiveness, another characteristic of the True (White) Woman, while the rosary signals that she is, according to the art historian Laura Prieto, "both blameless and religious-the pure, pious ideal of the cull of true womanhood."42 One contemporary critic who noted Beatrice Cenci`s "justifiable parricide" viewed the statue as embodying the ideals of True (White) Womanhood, interpreting the hands as showing "refinements [italics mine] and true delicate perception," while another applauded its "general harmony" and "graceful figure."43

Like Powers`s Greek Slave (Fig. 11), Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci enabled viewers to consider female sexuality and vulnerability during a period of increased concern about the dangers of sexuality. Both women-one captive, the other imprisoned-represent the epitome of female sexuality during this period: resigned, aloof, passionless, endangered, and morally superior through her steadfast faith. The theme of incest, moreover, permits the viewer to consider forbidden desire from a distance, condemning the perpetrator, sympathizing with the victim, and contemplating the dangers of sexuality within the morally sanctioned atmosphere of spirituality manifest in the rosary that Cenci fingers.44 Bealrire Cenci also inscribes sexuality and guilt onto the scene of innocence, but since the subject is sleeping, these elements are unconscious.

According to the literary critic Myra Jehlen, women characters in the nineteenth-century sentimental novel became empowered through their piety, turning into models of female self-respect by gaining control over their domestic environment: "the heroine`s culminating righteousness and its concomitant rewards [finding happiness in marriage] . . . indicate ... a new and quite rare emergence of female power." Jehlen also observes, "The sentimental cult of domesticity represent [s] a pragmatic feminism aimed primarily at establishing a place for women under their own rule" within the homo.45 Refusing to submit to her ruling father, Beatrice became insubordinate in the domestic sphere, like the heroines in the sentimental novel, creating a countermodel of a sentimental woman who is actively rather than passively subversive.

The family forms a site for the training of femininity, producing what Foucault calls "docile bodies" that act in accordance with the disciplinary power of the Father.46 As the literary scholar Peter B. Twitchell argues, the theme of patriarchal oppression in Shelley`s play is embodied in three ligures: Count Cenci, the judge at the trial, and the pope.47 Within this context, the "docile body" of Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci adheres to the disciplinary powers of the tripartite Father, all of whom dictated her submissive, relaxed, and resigned state. Incest always resides in the power of parents and the needs of children, who are entirely dependent on their parents for survival. "The horror of incest," according to the psychologist Judith Lewis Herman, "is not in the sexual act, but in the exploitation of children and the corruption of parental love."48 This statue, like recent fiction about father-daughter sexual abuse examined by the literary scholar Minrose C. Gwin, "reveals how the father`s power in the family is produced within, and itself reproduces, a cultural space that has historically emphasized property ownership and built up an instilutionalized system of the containment and usage of specific women`s bodies to those ends."49 The compositional containment of the statue constitutes this patriarchal containment even though Beatrice is restricted in prison for father slaying.

Hosmer`s sculpture contradicts and even critiques the Cult of True (While) Womanhood in its representation of a woman who had sex, albeit without consent, with her father. Although the reclining figure evokes the pious and submissive middle-class white Victorian woman, it fails to suggest a harmonious home created by a True Woman. Beatrice Cenci instead signals a dysfunctional family that involved abuse, incest, and murder. Hosmer brings to the viewer`s attention the internal contradictions of patriarchy: if the father of the family does not protect his children but perpetuates sexual violence on them, what justifies his rule over the family? In the nineteenth-century ideology of domesticity, the family was a safe haven, the sphere in which purity and piety reigned supreme. But incest, domestic violence, and rape expose not only the falsity of this picture but also the very real dangers of enclosing the family, of making it private and invisible to the society at large. Beatrice`s "safety" in a prison cell undercuts the notion of the home as a refuge, protecting purity and piety; her purity and piety are protected only outside the home.

Hosmer`s critique of the Cult of True (White) Womanhood and revelation of its contradictions is related to the women`s movement that developed in the United Stales during the 1840s. The women`s rights movement, led by Elizabeth Cady Sianton and Susan B. Anthony, had its origins in antislavery and temperance campaigns but came to center on women`s right to vote alter the famous Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, marking one way in which middle-class white women acted within public arenas in opposition to the Cult of True (White) Womanhood and revealing how the public and private spheres were not stable, but malleable.50 Hosmer`s sympathy with this feminist movement increased over the years. In 1869, visiting Anthony`s office in New York City to subscribe to her magazine, the Revolution, Hosmer met the famous suffragist.51 Later, in the 1890s, Hosmer not only advocated women`s right to vote and equality between men and women but also created Queen Isabella for the Daughters of Isabella, a Chicago suffragist group, of its patron, Isabella of Castille, to display at the World`s Columbian Exposition.52 The commission recognized that Hosmer`s art "has helped to lift the women of the century to a higher level."53 On Anthony`s death in 1906, Hosmer praised the woman`s suffrage advocate who had "been toiling on our behalf for years, and considered creating a "monument... which shall record the great deeds of great women wherever found."54 Hosmer`s Beatrice Cenci functions as such a monument, commemorating a woman who, although both passive and resigned, nevertheless refused to be a victim and who rebelled against patriarchal authority by killing her raping father.

Normalizing Incest

Besides expressing Hosmer`s developing feminist beliefs, Beatrice Cenci also embodies some of the contradictions that incest victims feel. These are summarized by the historian Linda Gordon: "Father-daughter incest creates confusion and double binds for girls because of their attempts to meet" two standards of virtue: "a good girl" must be "sexually pure: a virgin until marriage, innocent of sexual thoughts and experience," but she must also be "obedient to and under the protection of parents and men." Incest victims thus feel conflict between the expected "feminine balance between modesty and submission, chastity and obedience."55

Shortly after the ellipses that mark the word that Shelley`s play cannot name-incest-Beatrice "pauses, suddenly recollecting herself (3.1.56), and then questions whether her father "should call himself / My father" (3.1.73-74). "Oh, what am I? / What name, what place, what memory shall be mine?" (3.1.74-75). These words convey Beatrice`s confusion. Is Count Cenci her father or her lover? Is Beatrice his daughter or sexual partner? In this inversion of the norm, a father becomes his daughter`s surrogate husband, and a daughter becomes her father`s surrogate wife, as in the case of Count Cenci and Beatrice Cenci.56

Incest was illegal in the United States from the nation`s inception. Legislatures in the American colonies defined all sex offenses, including incest, according to the common-law definition in Great Britain, influenced by the biblical prohibition on incest from Leviticus, which forbade marriages between persons more closely related, by either blood or marriage, than fourth cousins.57 American state legislatures created "a hybrid civil-criminal statute" that simultaneously prohibited sexual intercourse and marriage between relatives. The 1779 Vermont statute exemplifies the inequity of criminal prosecution. It condemned both the victim and the perpetrator to a whipping, putting offenders in the stocks and forcing them to wear the letter I to punish them publicly. Statutes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries continued the regulation of marriage and the prevention of inbreeding through the assumption of both parties` guilt. Penalties were relatively light. During the mid-nineteenth century, incest cases in the United States were prosecuted under the statutory rape laws, which based culpability on knowledge of the prohibited age of the female. The statutory age of consent was initially set at ten or twelve, but over time the states raised it to fourteen, sixteen, or eighteen. As legal scholar Leigh B. Bienen summarizes the situation:

The goals incorporated within traditional Incest statutes include: the orderly regulation of marriage, the prevention of biologically harmful inbreeding, the rhetorical affirmation of moral and religious precepts derived from Judaic-Christian traditions generally and from the specific Biblical prohibition of Leviticus, and the setting out of punishment for sexual behavior perceived as deviant or exploitative.58

Victorian Americans understood the dangers that incest, especially father-daughter incest, caused in the family, and also, they believed, in society at large. As the Mississippi high court ruled in 1852, failure to punish those who commit incest "would undermine the foundations of social order and good government."59 Yet Southern jurists "helped preserve the patriarchal ideal and minimize state intrusion in the private sphere" because of the tension between the condemnation of incest on the one hand and the support of patriarchal culture on the other.60 Incest was an immoral, criminal act in which "patriarchal power" is "carried to its most egregious form and . .. the daughter`s [or son`s] submission and/or resistance to that power" is played out.61 Not until the rape reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s, however, would sex crimes be redefined in a significant number of states, resulting in changes and clarification in the legal system`s response to sexual abuse within the family.62 As this survey suggests, no laws specifically addressed incest until the late nineteenth century. It was not named, not visible, not conceptualized as a separate, specific problem, but rather subsumed under the rubric of statutory rape or marriage regulations.

In fact, not all cultural texts concurred with the law`s condemnation of the act. Karen Sánchez-Eppler argues that nineteenth-century temperance fiction locates scenes of salvation in the bed of a child who converts the drunken father into a good, temperate man. "In their stories of redemption through the love of a child," Sánchez-Eppler elaborates, "temperance writers have actually crossed . . . two cultural versions of incest [as a sign of male coercive power and as a promise of sexually satisfying domestic love] and reimagined male violence as domestic love." The child is thus figured both as "victim of abuse and agent of discipline." These texts fail to name the act of incest or include the reality of violence and sexual penetration,63 which, nevertheless, are absent presences.

The "Ghosting" of Intimate Relationships between Women

But what of Hosmer`s lifestyle, which I alluded to earlier? How is this an absent presence that can be traced? William Wetmore Story, an American sculptor living in Rome, had his own nickname for the "white marmorean flock," the group of American women sculptors living and working in Rome: "the harem (scarem) . . . [of] emancipated females."64 For this Harvard-educated ex-lawyer and son of an associate justice of 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 connections and relationships that the historians Lillian Fadennan and C.arroll 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, brothel`s, 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 described her as the "queerest, best-natured little chap possible," 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 Hawthorne 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 independence within the conventional female characteristics of quaintness, petite size, vulnerability, and good humor.74 But they also figure her as boyish, identifying her performance of masculine roles as eccentric.

Hosmer`s associates often commented on her dress. Hawthorne 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 costumes: "Her ample silken skirt was womanly, but the closely-filling 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 nurtured 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 independence 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 divorce, her cross-dressing, and what Herman MeKille 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 occurred 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 Stebbins.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 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 Hosmer was indeed erotic. Hosmer also had an affair with Gushman`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 "wedded 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.87 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 require[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 information 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 elaborates, "repeatedly evaporates into denial, concealment, or displacement. But it also never disappears."94 Hosmer, addressing 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 sympathetic 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 "unsuccessful 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 Hosmer`s success as an artist and an independent woman. Hosmer, 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 metamorphoser who transforms men into stone. Hosmer portrayed 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. Although 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 protected the perpetrators of violence. The passivity and resignation of the statue underscore these contradictions; Beatrice 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 repression 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, repressing 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 repression-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 inferiority 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 Onri, 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 Hosmer`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.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, Zenobia in Chains, 1859, marble, height 88 in. Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Gift of Mrs. Josephine M. J. (Arthur E.) Dodge (artwork in the public domain)

2 Hosmer, Medusa, 1854, marble, height 27 in. (68.6 cm). The Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The Detroit Institute of Arts)

3 Titian, Tarquin and Lurretin, 1568-71, oil on canvas, 71 × 54 ½ in. (182 × 140 cm). Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum (artwork in the public domain)

4 Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, ca. 1620, oil on canvas, 62 5/8 × 47 5/8 in. (159 × 121 cm). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (artwork in the public domain)

5 Erasttis Dow Palmer, The White Captive, 1858-59, marble, height 66 in. The Metropolitan Museum of An, New York. Bequest of Hamilton Fish, 1894, 94.9.3 (artwork in the public domain; photograph, all rights reserved, the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

6 Horatio Greenough, Resrur, 1837-53, marble, 141 × 122 in. (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by the Architect of the Capitol)

7 Thomas Crawford, The Indian: Dying Chief Contemplating the Progress of Civilization, 1856, marble, height 55 in. The NewYork Historical Society (artwork in the public domain)

8 Joseph Mozier, Pocahontas, 1877, marble, 48 ½ × 19 × 16 7/8 in. Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia, Gift of James H. Ricau and Museum Purchase, 86.495 (artwork in the public domain)

9 Hosmer, Beatrice Genet, 1853-55, marble, 24 × 63 × 24 in. The St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (artwork in the public domain)

10 Hosmer, Beatrice Cenci, detail. The St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (artwork in the public domain)

11 Hiram Powers, Greek Slave, 1869 (sixth version), marble, heigh 66 in. Brooklyn Museum of Art, Gift of Charles F. Bound, 55.14 (artwork in the public domain)





12 Edward Augustus Brackett, Shipwrecked Mother and Child, 1850-51, marble, height 23 ½ in. without base. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, gift of Edward Augustus Brackett (artwork in the public domain)

FOOTNOTE

Notes I would like to thank the following for invaluable comments that assisted me in improving this essay: Jay Bloom. Michele Bogart, Sarah Burns, Carolyn Dever, Leonard Folgarait, Christopher Johns, Joy Kasson, Stephen Rarhman, and Diane Sasson. 1. Henry James coined this phrase in his biography William Wetmore Story and His Friends, ed. Thomas Woodson, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903; reprint. New York: Kennedy Galleries and Da Capo Press, 1969), vol. 1, 257. See also William H. Gerdts, "The White Marmorean Flock," in The Whilf Marmorean Flock: Nineteenth Century American Women Neoclassiral Srulptors, ed. Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., Marie H. Morrison, and Carol Ockman (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College Art Gallery, 1972), 1-16. 2. Alicia Faxon, "Images of Women in the Sculpture of Harriet Hosmer," Woman`s Art Journal 2, no. 1 (1981): 25-29. Other sources for Hosmer`s life and art are Susan Van Rensselaer, "Harriet Hosmer," Antiqun 84, no. 4 (1963): 424-28; Wayne Craven, Sculpturr in America (New York: Cornwall Books, 1968; reprint. Newark, Del.: Universiry of Delaware Press, 1984), 325-30; Joseph Leach, "Harriet Hosmer: Feminist in Bronze and Marble," Feminist Art Journal 5, no. 2 (1976): 9-13. 44-45; Susan Waller, "The Artist, the Writer, and the Queen: Hosmer, Jameson, and Zenobia," Woman`s Art Journal 4, no. 1 (1983): 21-28; Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 141-65; and Charles Colbert, "Harriet Hosmer and Spiritualism," American Art 10, no. 3 (1996): 29-49. 3. Alan M. Weinberg, Shelley`s Italian Experience (New York: St. Martin`s Press, 1991), 75. 4. Terry Castle, The Appraritional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 30-31. See also Martha Vicinus, "Affirmations," in Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 138. The sociologist Avery F. Cordon also applies the term "ghostly presences" 10 some American literature, viewing "the ghostly haunt" as giving "notice that something is missing-that what appears to be invisible or in the shadows is announcing ilsell." Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 15. 5. Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, eds., Rape and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press. 1991). 3. 6. I derive the concept of the "incest narrative" from Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, Telling Incest: Narratives of Dangerous Remembering from Stein to Sapphire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2001), 2. 7. Richard Meyer employs the term "structuring absence" to discuss homosexualitv; I appropriate the term for incest. Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). 22-23. 8. Michel Foucaull, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 27. Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 53, cites this passage to address the silences over homosexuality. 9. Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 26. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. Merrian-Webster`s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. "silence." "ghost." Carolyn Dever discusses the meaning of the noun and verb "trace" in Wilkie Collins`s The Woman in White (1859-60). addressing Jacques Derrida`s discussion of this word as "a signifier of absent presence." Quotations about the meaning of "trace" derive from her text. Dever, Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998). 117-21. See also Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 61, 65, 145. 12. The attribution of the painting said to represent Beatrice Cenci has been questioned, although nineteenth-century British and American artists and writers accepted Reni as the artist. Shelley saw the painting while il was in the Colomia Callery, but il had moved to the Palazzo Barberini in the lasi vears of the eighteenth century. For the attribution of the painting, see Arthur McComb, The Baroqur Painters of Italy: An Introductory Historical Survey (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell. 1968). 26. This painting is significantly absent from Stephen D. Pepper`s Guido Reni: A Complete Catalogue of His Works (New York: New York University Press, 1984), suggesting that the attribution is incorrect. 13. Herman MeKille, Peirre, or The Ambiguities (New York: Literary Classics, 1984), 407. For discuvsions of Melville`s comment and his symbolic use of Beatrice Cenci in his novel, see Ixmise K. Barnell, "American Novelists and the `Portrait of Beatrice Cenci,`" New England Quarterly 53. no. 2 (1980): 171. 173-77; R. L. Carolhers. "Melville`s `Cenci`: A Portrait of Pierre," Hall Stair University Forum 10. no. 1 (1969): 53-59; Diane Long Hoeveler, "La Cenci: The Incest Motif in Hawthonie and Melville," Amrrican Transcendental Quarterly 44 (Fall 1979): 247-59; Leon Chai, "MeKille and Shelley: Speculations on Metaphysics. Morals, and Poetics in Peirre and `Shelley`s Vision,` " ESQ [Emrson Society Quarterly]: A Journal of the American Renaissance 29, no. 1 (1983): 31-45; James W. Mathews, "The Fnigma of Beatrice Cenci: Shelley and Melville," South Atlantic Review 49, no. 2 (1984): 31-41; and Charles Walts. "Energy and Gentleness Double-Hooded: The Figure of Beatrice Cenci in Shelley, Hawthorne, and Melville," in Melville "Among the Nations," ed. Sanford E. Marovitz and A. C. Christodoulou (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001), 440-54. For material about Hawthorne`s Marble Faun, see Barnett, 168, and Spencer Hall, "Beatrice Cenci: Symbol and Vision in The Marble Faun," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (1970): 85-95. Myra Jehlen comments on the "parallels between Miriam`s mysterious past and the story of Beatrice." Jehlen, American Incarnation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 180. For additional information about Melville, Hawthorne, and Shelley`s interpretations of the Cenci narrative, see Belinda Elizabeth Jack, Beatrice`s Spell: The Enduring Ijtgend of Beatrice Cenci (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004). 14. Nathaniel Hawthorne, February 20, 1858, in The French and Italian Notebooks, ed. Thomas Woodson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 93. 15. Ibid., 92. 16. Ibid., and February 20, 1858, 93. 17. Natalie Cole Michta makes a similar observation about Melville`s Pierre, commenting that it refers to Beatrice Cenci as "victim of rape by her father and conspirer in his murder" and that she combines "sexuality and chastity, guilt and innocence, and the roles of sexual partner and daughter, aggressor and victim." Michta, "`Plucked Up Out of a Mystery`: Archetypal Resonance in Hawthorne`s Marble Faun," ESQ: Ajournai of the American Renaissance 31, no. 4 (1985): 252. Peter L. Thorslev Jr., in "Incest as Romande Symbol," Comparative Literature Studies 2, no. 1 (1965): 41-58, addresses the pervasiveness of the incest theme in Romantic literature but ignores the ways in which the authors "ghost" this in their texts. For the dichotomy between male/female and adult/child in incest, see Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (London: Routledge, 1993), 72. 18. Faxon, "Images of Women," 25, argues that Hosmer`s works express "both the aspirations and limitations placed on women artists during the second half of the century," while Colbert, "Hosmer and Spiritualism," 29, 47, suggests that Spiritualism provided "much of the impetus for her rejection of conventional feminine roles." 19. Hosmer to Wayman Crow, August 1854, in Cornelia Crow Carr, Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1912), 37. For the observation that Hosmer invoked a personal, familial relationship, see Laura Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The ProfessionalizatioAUTHOR AFFILIATION

Vivien Green Fryd, a professor at Vanderbilt University, is the author of Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the U.S. Capitol, 1815-60 and An and the Crisis of Marriage: Georgia O`Keeffe and Edward Hopper. She is currently preparing a book-length manuscript on rape and incest in American art [Department of Art and Art History, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn. 37235, vivien.g.fryd@vanderbilt.edu].

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