Anna De Biasio

Università di Venezia, Ca' Foscari,

Venezia (Italy)

Copies Outstrip "Originals”: Artistic Representations from The Marble Faun (1860) to The Wings of the Dove (1902)

In The Wings of the Dove, the pictorial references are comparatively few among the novel’s rich web of second-degree fictions: from start to finish, the characters see themselves or are seen as actors and spectators of the “show” of their story, and as readers, writers, and protagonists of as many novels, romances, and fairy-tales within the master-narrative.[1] However, I believe that their crucial position in the story and their special appeal to the visual faculties of the reader render the pictorial allusions in The Wings of the Dove pivotal elements of the overall anti-mimetic and “difficult” vocation of the novel. The mentions of Bronzino, Watteau, Veronese and the “art spaces” thereby created should not be treated as simply symbolic enhancers or effective “overtones”: instead, these references can be regarded as mainstays of the policy of “silent exhibition” which James increasingly conceived of as the novel’s standard of perfection.[2]

For James, and especially for the James of the major phase, indirection signifies not saying, or saying in a mediated form.[3] It is principally by their being grounded in an analogic mode that pictorial images appear to serve the interests of the indirect method that dominates the book. I will argue that in accordance with a relation of reciprocity inaugurated by The Marble Faun, just as characters and situations resemble those of famous paintings, so do some central facts of the novel remain unseen or untold. The emphasis upon secondary aesthetic spaces, then, coincides with a series of connected effects: decreased interest in the linear account and solution of the plot (what Roland Barthes called the “hermeneutic” code); increased efforts by characters and readers to decodify the reality presented by the text; finally, the establishment of a “high-art sphere” in which even the heartbreaking event of a girl’s mortal illness can be celebrated with composure.

I will now consider briefly the germs of this handling of visual representation in The Marble Faun, and then discuss its impact on The Wings of the Dove.

I. “Snatched Away to a Land of Picture”: Hawthorne’s Copies and Originals

It is well-known that with The Marble Faun Hawthorne was just as interested in writing an original story line as in voicing his discoveries about the Italian art treasures. The focus on artifacts is so paramount that the usual arrangement of the narrative material is practically reversed: the concern for sculptures and paintings tends to swallow up that for character and theme.

Right at the outset, Donatello’s features and the dominant moral concerns of the novel converge in the three-page long description of Praxiteles’ Faun. The statue, like Donatello, is incapable of conceiving either good or evil, yet there is a hope that he may be redeemed in the future: “It is possible, too, that the Faun might be educated through the medium of his emotions.”[4] (9) These ekfrases or visually descriptive passages of varying length not only interrupt the development of the action, but also anticipate and explore the novel’s main motifs: art description in The Marble Faun generally results in the creation of a space for abstract discussion and conjecture-making.

When visualizing the artworks to whom the characters are constantly compared, Hawthorne seems much concerned with investigating the qualities that make them effective. “Hilda, can you interpret what the feeling is, that gives this picture [murderous Beatrice Cenci, see slide] such a mysterious force?” asks Miriam (65), but continuously both narrator and characters are involved in the activity of interpretation and sense-making. They “deem”, “appreciate”, “inquire”, “fancy”, “detect”, “suggest” as many similarities, deep meanings, and possible explanations as the number of the art pieces that provide a virtual re-enactment of the novel’s crucial events.

As will be the case with The Wings of the Dove, this emphasis upon ratiocination and etiology is accompanied by a lack of reliable information regarding the novel’s main occurrences. Not only does the killing of the Capuchin happen off-stage in ambiguous circumstances, but many questions remain unanswered also about Miriam’s and her persecutor’s identity, Hilda’s commission, and many of the characters’s doings. Although later he was forced to provide clarification to pacify his disappointed readers, Hawthorne seemed to regard the suppression of causal (and temporal) explanation as an integral part of this particular project, which according to Richard Brodhead is deeply implicated—especially through the figure of Hilda—in the establishment and defense of the authority of high culture.[5] This is how the authorial voice justifies Hilda’s last absence [Hilda was earlier defined as “an inhabitant of picture-land, a partly ideal creature... not to be approached too closely” (63)]:

Whence she had come, or where she had been hidden, during this mysterious interval, we can but imperfectly surmise... It is better perhaps, to fancy that she had been snatched away to a Land of Picture...to converse with the great, departed Masters of the pencil, and behold the diviner works which they have painted in heavenly colours. (452)

In the paradise of pure aesthetic contemplation, Hawthorne seems to suggest, accounting for time and place—and characters’ flights—is really besides the point.

II. “Remaining Aloft in the Divine Dustless Air”: Silence and High Art in The Wings of the Dove

The method of indirect presentation is at work throughout The Wings of the Dove, but it is possible to trace an internal progression from the relatively high degree of “realism” in book one to the apotheosis of indirectness represented by Milly’s death in the art fortress of Palazzo Leporelli.

The first “Dickensian” scene set in Mr. Croy’s house appears as a perfect exemplar of Jamesian dystopia. The conflation of moral and physical sordidness is conveyed by the rich description of the ambience, the clipped dialogue in which sentimental and financial matters are stated bluntly through colloquialisms and stark phrasal verbs (such as “throw it up at me”, “throw yourself upon me”), amidst smells and images of spoons, broth, and eggs. Mr. Croy’s ethic-aesthetic dishonor apparently brings with it a considerable amount of sensuousness and straightforwardness:

What he couldn’t forgive was her dividing with Marian her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to give them. She should have divided it with him. (69)[6]

As the focus shifts to the relationship between Kate and Densher, the dominant concern becomes to explore the complications of thwarted love and straitened circumstances through the interplay of the characters’ consciousness. As self-proclaimed “hideously intelligent” people, Kate and Densher are good examples of the “really furnished, the finely civilized” character of which James lamented the lack in Flaubert’s fiction.[7] They are defined as passionate throughout, yet they fell in love on the basis of “feeling” and “knowing” rather than of “looking and handling.” (89) According to the logic of paradox that underlies the novel, the intenser the human situation becomes for the “complicated” spirits, the less visible and tangible—and also less easily statable—become the problems at stake.

This is of course especially true for the person of Milly, whose charm demands an explanation “that remained a muffled and intangible form,” whose beauty cannot be “named grossly” (130), and the fatality of whose illness is practically denied every time it is evoked: her impending death is repeatedly associated with a condition of utmost happiness, splendour, unfailingness. What is the place, then, of Bronzino, Watteau, and Veronese, within the textual pattern that I have traced so far?

The Bronzino portrait appears to work as a the first powerful embodiment of the ideal of “ineffable expression” and “highest experience of luxury” invoked by James in the Preface. In the magnificence of Matcham, among the cream of London society, Milly already perceives things and people as something other than themselves: they are elements of a Watteau festive composition, subjects of a pre-existing fictional realm. Lord Mark’s urging her to confront the Bronzino image has the effect of precipitating this tension between “reality” and reproduction. Alerted by the narrator’s insistence upon Milly’s likeness to the lady portrayed, we receive for the first time a full physical description that can be applied to Milly. More importantly, the crucial epiphany of Milly’s weeping before the portrait coincides with her openly stating the fact of her death. In other words, it is by means of the fictional image, through a process of mediation and transferal, that the tragic core of the story finds perhaps its most empathetic and sharable expression.

Yet, stepping into the domain of the “departed Masters” does not only mean being provided with a supplementary viewpoint for the gaps and silences of the text. The insertion of visual allusions also entails an “elevation” of the narrative in at least two senses. On the one hand—and this is quite obvious—the choice of mentioning those specific painters both parallels and emphasizes the high class milieux frequented by the protagonists: the paintings depict aristocratic personages, lordly banquets and rendez-vous set against majestic background. Not accidentally, from this moment on the characters will more and more often use hyperbole, describing each other as “superb”, “splendid”, “extraordinary”, “magnificent”, and the like.

On the other hand, as similarities with pictorial models help the characters assess their condition in relation to themselves and each other, so the pictorial allusions invite the reader to participate in the activity of textual interpretation. In this novel, there are no ready-made solutions for the moral ambiguities that human relationships entail. Similarly, the references to famous painters work mainly as a stimulus to autonomous cooperative activity on the part of the reader. The paintings’ titles are not given in the text, and in order to make the evocations correspond to the various Lucrezia Panciatichi, Feast at the House of Levi, Marriage at Cana etc., James had to rely on the artistic knowledge and visual memory of his readers (not to mention his critics), as well as on their ability of recognizing and formulating likenessess which are only possibly revelatory, but by no means univocal. It is significant that even Milly’s “strong reading” of the Bronzino is mitigated by a qualifier: “Perhaps it was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair.” (196) The “attention of perusal” requested in the preface, therefore, would definitely seem to include the reader’s willingness to take on this kind of visual and hermeneutical task.

In conclusion, I would like to discuss how the Venetian setting adds to the cult of the “highly civilized state” that the novel celebrates also by means of the pictures it puts on show. The references to Veronese are clustered around Milly’s reception in honor of Sir Luke, but his name, together with that of Bronzino, is evoked earlier and both pervade the Palazzo Leporelli scene. In fact, the persistent reminder of this underlying aesthetic framework—the “tremendous old staircase” so reminiscent of Veronese’s painting, Milly’s pearls so much like those of the Bronzino lady—is an open invitation to enter the new setting as if we were entering a museum (or a temple to the art).

Just like in James’s ecstatic recollection of his first visit to the Louvre, the air in the “high florid rooms” is still and golden, the vast spaces are empty, silent, and significantly inodorous, the notion of time is suspended. Silence is of course not only an environmental condition; it also shapes the relationships between the characters. At this point of the story, Kate and Milly have ceased to communicate and only infer at each other’s secrets.

Absence of talk is defined as a state of pleasure: “With so many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted, on a nominal motive—which was decently represented by a joy at the drop of chatter.” (340) Style matches theme and suggests the compensations for a patient and attentive reading: the narrator’s effort to render the characters’ most eloquent silences is conveyed by the typical major-phase manner—tortuous construction, abstract nouns, nominal sentences.[8] Interestingly enough, the description of Milly’s palace and this kind of “inferential” writing curiously recall Pierre Bourdieu’s reflections on the demands made upon the public by free access to museums:

The prohibition against touching the objects, the religious silence that is forced upon visitors, the puritan asceticism of the facilities, always scarce and uncomfortable, the almost systematic refusal of any instruction, the grandiose solemnity of the decoration and the decorum, colonnades, vast galleries, decorated ceilings, monumental staircases both outside and inside, everything seems to remind people that the transition from the profane world to the sacred world presupposes, as Durkheim says, “a genuine metamorphosis”, a radical spiritual change.[9]

The laborious unraveling of the story corresponds, after Book Eight, to Densher’s mental and spiritual effort to reconcile his iniquitous pact with his increasing attraction to Milly’s “high style and state” (369): that is, to the spectacle of her moral and material generosity. As the text repeats on two occasions, he is trying to figure out, not very successfully, his own role in the Veronese painting into which he has walked (381, 386).

Milly, on the other hand, is already part and parcel of the artistic realm that surrounds her, which is also increasingly conceived of as a reign of pure spirit and poetry. Yet what does it mean to be the “priestess of the worship”, to literally embody, in other words, a grandiose work of art, be it a Bronzino or a Veronese?

In simple terms, it means to gradually disappear from the narrative scene, as if snatched away to a Land of Picture, just like Hilda. It means not to complain, not to smell, not to be heard, not to be seen, not to be read; if possible, not even to die, as the metaphor which finally answers the reiterated question about Milly’s death wavers between suggesting a folding and a wider spreading of wings. The “agents of the higher tone”, as James called them, and which range here from stylistic complexity to illustrious paintings, bespeak their capacity for absorbing the sensuous and pathetic power of the narrative.

At this point, the thorny issue becomes how to assess the extent to which the Jamiasian wrapping of love and suffering in the “beauty and dignity of art” entails an unsettling blurring of ethic and aesthetic distinctions. In the larger-than-life dimension of the unseen and the untold, Milly’s protracted end becomes a “magnificent” condition to admire, and Aunt Maud can almost let herself go to “enjoy the perfection of the pathos” as she discusses with Densher the splendidly reserved fashion in which Milly is dying (467). Not surprisingly, James himself appeared to be quite aware of the potential perversity of such a purely contemplative tension. The following passage is taken from The American Scene and records James’s visit to the Baltimore University Hospital:

Even a morning hour or two at the great University Hospital...even that beginning of the day did nothing to obtrude the ugly or to overemphasize the real; it simply contributed, under some perversion that I can neither explain nor defend, to the general grace of the picture. Why should the great Hospital, with its endless chambers of woe, its whole air as of most directly and advisedly facing, as the hospitals of the world go, the question of the immensities of pain—why should such an impression actually have turned, under the spell, to fine poetry, to a mere shining vision of the conditions, the high beauty of Applied Science? [10]

Not many years later, in an essay on John Ruskin, Marcel Proust warned against the “sin of idolatry” that he saw as endemic among the writers his contemporaries. Proust contends that the artist—and he includes himself here—should at least attempt to resist, if not overcome, the temptation to place the model, the copy, before the original; that is, to worship the intellectual enjoyment of beauty in the face of natural or human matters. We do not love the hawthorn flower in itself and because of itself, Proust says, but because we recognize it as already painted or described by that particular artist we admire.[11]

Perhaps it is preferable to leave James’s question about the grace of the hospital in abeyance, together with Densher’s outcry against the “mere aesthetic instinct of mankind” and the “conspiracy of silence” surrounding Milly’s drama (440). In fact, somehow in line with a well-known argument by F. O. Matthiessen, one could say that the real counterforce to the aesthetic of aggrandizement largely espoused by The Wings of the Dove lies in some crucial insights into Densher’s sense of unease. His recognized sexual urges, his unconvincing ambitions as a fiction-writer, his tormented walks along visibly dusky alleys and in palpably lashing rain, his incapability of becoming the gentleman of a Veronese painting, offer at least a considerable resistance to the "author's instinct everywhere for the indirect presentation of his main image."[12]

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[1] On the “secondary fictions” of The Wings of the Dove—with special reference to the theatrical and the narrative codes—see Lida Incollingo, “‘A Set of Polished Mirrors’: The Wings of the Dove di Henry James”, Il racconto allo specchio. Mise en abyme e tradizione narrativa, Roma: Nuova Arnica, 1990.

[2] Sergio Perosa, Henry James and the Experimental Novel, Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1978, 196.

[3] Donatella Izzo, Henry James, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1981, 101.

[4] Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. Henceforth all quotations in the text refer to this edition.

[5] See Richard Brodhead, “Introduction” to The Marble Faun, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1990.

[6] Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Henceforth all quotations in the text refer to this edition.

[7] Henry James, “Introduction to Madame Bovary” (1902), reprinted in Notes on Novelists (1914), in Literary Criticism, New York: Library of America, 1984, 338.

[8] For a classical study of James’s “difficulty”, see Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972.

[9] Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993, 237.

[10] Henry James, The American Scene, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994, 235.

[11] Marcel Proust, “John Ruskin”, in Pastiches et mélanges in Contre Saint-Beuve, Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

[12] Henry James, Preface to The Wings of the Dove, cit, 50 (James's italics).