AMBIVALENT STATES:
ANGLO-AMERICAN EXPATRIATES IN ITALY FROM 1848 TO 1892
by
MOLLIE ELIZABETH BARNES
(Under the Direction of Tricia Lootens)
ABSTRACT
This dissertation studies Anglo-American expatriates who address, or pointedly don’t
address, the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy. I argue that the ambivalence writers
associate with Italy is important, not just because it upends allegiances normally understood as
simply republican or as simply anti-republican, but also because it challenges the ways we read
the mood of the period and the ways we define emerging nation-states. I frame the dissertation
with Margaret Fuller, who argues that this mid-century moment forced her to reconcile
seemingly incompatible allegiances to “Art” and to the “the state of the race” or “the state of the
people.” Anglo-American Italophiles were, in fact, often overwhelmed by ambivalence in the
wake of the mid-century revolutions; and expatriate writers often realized allegiances to politics
and to aesthetics, to republicans and to anti-republicans.
I trace Anglo-American expatriates in three cities (Rome, Florence, and Venice) and
across two generations (1848–1870 and 1871–1892), and I divide the dissertation into three
diptychs: chapters one and two are about Rome; chapters three and four are about Florence; and
chapters five and six are about Venice. The first half of each diptych shows how mid-century
writers weren’t defined by unequivocal republicanism or unequivocal anti-republicanism but by
a much more elusive disposition: politicoaesthetic ambivalence. I argue that this ambivalence
intensifies in the years just following the unification of the peninsula. The second half of each
diptych shows how the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy became a mythology. Yet
expatriate writers often demonstrate the ways that Italy resists an arcadian mythology and the
ways the Risorgimento didn’t lead—inevitably—to the Unification of Italy.
While this dissertation studies Italy specifically, it also studies the ways that Italy
upended Anglo-American expatriates’ ideas about nations and nationalisms. By the turn of the
century, many writers were still haunted by mid-century histories, historiographies, and the
ongoing fragility defining the peninsula. Italy became, then, a nerve center for renderings of
statehood, nationhood, and civic belonging; this nexus for the patriotic imaginary inspired
writers to place politics, aesthetics, and often misguided humanitarian desires in unexpected
conversation with one another.
INDEX WORDS:
1848, Italy, Grand Tour, Risorgimento, Unification, Expatriatism,
Transatlanticism, Transnationalism, Ambivalence, Aesthetics, Politics,
Nineteenth-Century Travelogues, Nineteenth-Century Letters, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows, George Eliot, Middlemarch,
Margaret Fuller, Dispatches, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun,
Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget),
Vanitas: Polite Stories, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” Effie
Ruskin, Effie in Venice, John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
AMBIVALENT STATES:
ANGLO-AMERICAN EXPATRIATES IN ITALY FROM 1848 TO 1892
by
MOLLIE ELIZABETH BARNES
BA, Agnes Scott College, 2006
A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial
Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
ATHENS, GEORGIA
2012
© 2012
Mollie Elizabeth Barnes
All Rights Reserved
AMBIVALENT STATES:
ANGLO-AMERICAN EXPATRIATES IN ITALY FROM 1848 TO 1892
by
MOLLIE ELIZABETH BARNES
Major Professor:
Committee:
Electronic Version Approved:
Maureen Grasso
Dean of the Graduate School
The University of Georgia
May 2012
Tricia Lootens
Roxanne Eberle
Richard Menke
iv
DEDICATION
for my mom and my dad, Barbara and Dale Barnes, and for my sister, Hannah Barnes
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are countless teachers between the pages of this dissertation, and their intellectual
generosity has made each word in each sentence possible for me to write. I am grateful to every
single one of them. My most heartfelt thanks belong to Tricia Lootens, my major professor,
whose kindness, graciousness, and unwavering commitment to good work have sustained me. I
am grateful to Professor Lootens for prodding me at just the right moments in just the right ways,
while always granting me a real sense of liberty with this dissertation. Professor Lootens has
changed the ways I read, and the ways I make that reading matter. She brings Margaret Fuller’s
and George Eliot’s beautiful words to life for me, and I am thankful to have had her as my
mentor these last six years. In her ever-gentle ways, she has helped me to articulate why I love
what I love so much. Above all, I thank her for instilling in me a faith—and then at crucial
moments a renewed faith—in research as meaningful work. I know that I couldn’t have finished
this degree—and, perhaps much more importantly, I couldn’t have enjoyed the process of
finishing this degree—without her.
I feel grateful to have had the support of the nineteenth-century trifecta at the University
of Georgia. I want to thank Roxanne Eberle and Richard Menke for their constancy as teachers,
as readers, and as advocates. I am grateful to Professor Eberle for talking with me about the
nuances of writers as various as Felicia Hemans and Effie Ruskin, for helping me to envision the
shapes of chapters in their infancies, and for embodying the kind of warm professionalism that I
strive toward. I am grateful to Professor Menke for reminding me to bask in the details (both
literary and literary historical) that make close reading a pleasure, for granting me the chance to
vi
learn how to teach in his classroom, and for reminding me to cherry pick so that I’d always be
writing what I most wanted to be writing.
I am fortunate to have had Kris Boudreau’s enduring mentorship and friendship over the
last six years: she helped me to feel at home in Athens, Georgia; and even from Worcester,
Massachusetts, she has helped me to realize who I want to be in my professional life. Michelle
Ballif, Barbara McCaskill, and Sujata Iyengar have been important professional role models, and
I am grateful to them for helping me to be part of their vibrant intellectual communities.
I will always think of Agnes Scott College as my intellectual and my spiritual home away
from home. I’d like to thank Charlotte Artese; Steve Guthrie; Linda Hubert; Peggy Thompson;
and especially Christine Cozzens, who believed in me as a student and as a tutor and as a literary
pilgrim, and who always saw that I was a Victorianist at heart; Rachel Trousdale, who
introduced me to George Eliot and who taught me to read ecstatically; Willie Tolliver, Jr., who
introduced me to Henry James and who taught me that the meaning of life is in novels as much
as it is in the cells and in the molecules I was studying in those pre-medicine classes. Professor
Tolliver is the inspiration for this dissertation in many ways, not only because he taught me
about the complexities of patriotism and of expatriatism in my first college literature class, but
also because he taught me to be exacting with my work. I strive to become for my students what
these professors at Agnes Scott College and at the University of Georgia continue to be for me.
I’d also like to thank some of my friends from my Decatur years and from my Athens
years and beyond: Julia Charles for being one of my oldest and dearest friends, and for helping
me spell myself out, long after our days as third-floor-Winship, main-floor-McCain-Library
compatriots; Nicole Camastra for her strength and for her wit over countless breakfasts, dinners,
and trips to the farmers market; and Amber Shaw for being the very best reader and the very best
vii
friend I have had these last six years, for being the only person who will ever send me text
messages in the voice of Hyacinth Robinson, and for teaching me grace at moments when
gracelessness would have been easier. Little Ruby Chanticleer, the sweetest cat in Georgia, has
kept my lap warm, my books and papers ruffled just right, and my sense of humor in check.
Above all, I am thankful to my mom, to my dad, and to my sister: my most faithful
teachers and the most important people in my life. I want to thank my dad, who taught me what
it means to work on papers, and my mom, who taught me what it means to read books about
people, just people. Thank you for teaching me to do my best work night after night at the
kitchen table; for showing me the world beyond California and Iowa and Georgia; and for
making sure I would be able to have and to love this education, long before I knew where I
would find myself. For Hannah I feel a kind of infinite gratitude I can hardly begin to measure,
even in the language shared only between sisters: hundreds and thousands and millions of
chocolate salmon will never do. I love you all—first—most—best—and always.
viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v
INTRODUCTION
Ambivalent Politics, Ambivalent Aesthetics, and Risorgimento Grand Narratives............1
CHAPTER
1
Rome, 1848–1870
“Intervals between Two Breaths”: Crises of Repose from Fuller to Hawthorne........31
2
Rome, 1871–1892
“Experiments in Time”: the Risorgimento, the Unification of Italy, and Present
Tenses in Middlemarch ...............................................................................................95
3
Florence, 1848–1870
Meaningful “Discrepancies”: Twofold Exposition in Casa Guidi Windows ..........149
4
Florence, 1871–1892
After Solferino: Risorgimento Ghosts and Post-Risorgimento Hauntings in “The
Legend of Madame Krasinska” .................................................................................210
5
Venice, 1848–1870
Not Just Mrs. Ruskin or Mrs. Millais: “Effie in Venice” Revisited .........................249
6
Venice, 1871–1892
Risorgimento in Absentia: Hyacinth Robinson’s Venetian Letter ...........................323
BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................391
1
INTRODUCTION
Ambivalent Politics, Ambivalent Aesthetics, and Risorgimento Grand Narratives
“Like others, I went through the painful process of sight-seeing, so unnatural everywhere, so counter to the healthful
methods and true life of the mind. You rise in the morning knowing there are around you a great number of objects
worth knowing, which you may never have a chance to see again. You go every day, in all moods, under all
circumstances; you feel, probably, in seeing them, the inadequacy of your preparation for understanding or duly
receiving them; this consciousness would be most valuable if you had time to think and study, being the natural way
in which the mind is lured to cure its defects—but you have no time, you are always wearied, body and mind,
confused, dissipated, sad. The objects are of commanding beauty or full of suggestion, but you have no quiet to let
that beauty breathe its life into your soul—no time to follow up these suggestions and plant for your proper harvest.”
—Margaret Fuller, Dispatch No. 19 (29 January 1848)
“One great deduction to me from the delight of seeing world-famous objects is the frequent double consciousness
which tells me that I am not enjoying the actual vision enough, and that when higher enjoyment comes with the
reproduction of the scene in my imagination I shall have lost some of the details, which impress me too feebly in the
present because the faculties are not wrought up into energetic action.”
—George Eliot, “Recollections of Italy” (1860)
In a letter to William Henry Channing dated 7 May 1847, Margaret Fuller confesses,
perhaps unexpectedly, that “Art is not important to me now” (Memoirs of Margaret Fuller 209).
She follows this avowal with a commitment to mid-century Italy that became her ideological
signature: “I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them”
(209). Writing from the Eternal City just one year before the Spring of Nations transformed the
Italian Peninsula and the rest of the European Continent, Fuller was already sensitive to the
urgent political crises she witnessed during her travels from Boston to London, to Paris, but also
to Rome, to Florence, and to Venice. Fuller seems to acknowledge that if she was once drawn to
this place for its intellectual history (the art, the artists, and the mythologies she knew well from
her vast reading of Western literature), then her experience abroad complicated this textbook
worldview. Fuller’s letter shows how she had come to pit an appreciation of Old-World “Art”
2
against contemporary Italy, as if her allegiances to one might betray her allegiances to the other,
or as if she could not devote herself wholeheartedly to both.
Fuller’s correspondence with James Freeman Clarke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret
Crane Fuller (her mother), Richard Frederick Fuller (her brother), and Horace Greeley (her
editor) demonstrates her commitment to present-tense Italy, to “the people,” “the race,” and the
yet untold human exigencies that came to define this tumultuous period. Her much more public
dispatches to the New-York Daily Tribune (1846–1850) reveal, in fact, that she interpreted this
moment through transatlantic intersections. She realized that looming wars in American and
Italian States challenged the tenability of unified nations. In Europe, she was deeply affected by
encounters with revolutionaries as various as William Wordsworth, Thomas Carlyle, George
Sand, Giuseppe Mazzini, Adam Mickiewicz, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina
Trivulzio Belgiojoso.1 These encounters hastened a pivotal transformation in Fuller’s ideas
about the relationship between aesthetics and politics.2 Indeed, Fuller’s letter to Channing
suggests that this was a period of ideological reassessment during which she forced herself to
question the relevance of art and artists to crises of civic identity.3
Still, as famous as Fuller became in the wake of the Risorgimento and the Unification of
Italy, her self-conscious sacrifice of “Art” for “the people” or “the race” seems to have been
deeply personal. 1847 was undoubtedly an anxiety-laden year for Fuller, whose political
1
Belgiojoso is often cited as an inspiration for Henry James’s Christina Light, who appears in Roderick Hudson
(1875), which I mention in chapters one and six, and in The Princess Casamassima (1886), which I discuss in
chapter six.
2
Fuller’s interest in “the state of the people” and “the state of the race” didn’t mark her entrée to cosmopolitan
political circles. Before leaving Massachusetts, she was famous for Summer on the Lakes (1843), Women in the
Nineteenth Century (1845), her editorial work for The Dial (1839–1844), and her often political “Conversations”
held at Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookshop in Boston (1839–1844).
3
Larry Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith note in their introduction to the dispatches that during “her travels
throughout England, France, and Italy during 1846–47, Fuller had met those who became leaders in the
revolutionary movement, and as a resident of Italy from 1848 to 1850, she actively allied herself with the republican
cause” (2). Reynolds and Smith argue that after Fuller’s arrival in Italy in March 1847, she became increasingly
radicalized (17–18). Fuller’s correspondence reveals that she was committed to the Risorgimento by May or June;
this timeline coincides with the tone of her letter to Channing.
3
conscience was unfolding, day-by-day, alongside the yet indeterminate revolutions. She admits
to Channing, in fact, that this disinterest in “Art” would probably seem unusual to people who
were familiar with her and her work: “I write not to you about these countries, of the famous
people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated
margin on the text of my inward life. Earlier, they would have been more” (209). By describing
her life metatextually (the unimportant things exist on the margins of the manuscript pages, and
they appear to be “illuminated”), Fuller tacitly acknowledges her own status as a celebrity who
mediates life in Rome (and later in Florence and in Venice) with life in New York and the rest of
the United States. As Fuller distances herself from famous art and artists and champions lessstoried narratives with immediate—and yet-to-be determined—consequence, she realizes that
this experience will likely transform her public persona. The occasion seems, then, to have
sparked a profoundly existential awakening for Fuller, whose meditation on “inward life” echoes
a lifelong, though not untroubled, engagement with Channing, with Emerson, and with the other
Transcendentalists. For as devoted as she became to the Roman and the Florentine Revolutions
between 1847 and 1850, Fuller seems always to have remembered Concord, her intellectual and
spiritual home, and the site of America’s beginnings as a unified republic less than a century
earlier.
It is Fuller’s critique of expatriate art, artists, and political sentiment that I find most
provocative. Fuller’s dispatches are undoubtedly crucial to nineteenth-century transnational
history. Between 1847 and 1850, she implored her compatriots overseas to support the Italian
Revolutions with increasing fervor, providing New Yorkers with updates on the Roman and the
Florentine Republics faster than other transatlantic journalists. Throughout her dispatches to the
New-York Daily Tribune, Fuller argues that Americans have a patriotic duty to support Italians:
4
she reminds her readers that both republics were young and were founded on similar principles.
Fuller’s dispatches are perhaps the most famous appeals within the transatlantic network that
rallied mid-century American loyalty.4 Even as Fuller’s dispatches trace the political allegiances
she felt ought to draw Americans and Italians together, however, they also document her
frustration with American—often expatriate American—indifference to contemporary events in
Rome and in Florence. These critiques of Americans with immediate claims to Rome and to
Florence remain largely undiscussed and are central to this project because they demonstrate her
intended audience may have been Americans in Italian states as much as it was Americans in
American states.
Fuller was especially critical of the artists and the writers who populated AngloAmerican colonies in Rome, in Florence, and in Venice, because she believed that their
indifference to contemporary Italy asseverated the enclave’s distanced political identity—they
didn’t belong to the United Kingdom or to the United States, but they didn’t want to belong to
Italy either—and often nurtured a solipsistic aesthetic. From Fuller’s perspective, the artists’ and
the writers’ cosmopolitan lassitude was perverse. This lingering moodiness, she assumed,
allowed them to remove themselves from discussions about “the state of the people” or the “state
of the race.” Throughout her dispatches, Fuller intimates that expatriates’ “Art”-inspired
lassitude often appears as a solipsistic—even as a self-consciously solipsistic—euphemism for
political indifference. Even while she describes expatriate artists’ work repeatedly in the
dispatches published between 1847 and 1850, then, she also catalogues the expatriates who do
and don’t support republican causes (for instance, joining/not joining the Roman and the
4
In many cities across the United States, sympathizers organized Italian Societies and fundraising campaigns to
support Unification (Riall, Garibaldi 107–8). Among the most passionate sympathizers were republicans who left
Italy and came to the United States, often to New York City, as political exiles (107–8).
5
Florentine civic guards), and she often chastises the self-isolating ones for their apathy.5 Her
distaste for art and artists’ colonies seems most intense, then, in the moments when she’s most
critical of expatriate insularity. By isolating themselves within expatriate communities, these
Anglo-American artists and writers become so overwhelmed with their commitments to their
aesthetics, Fuller reasons, that they often blind themselves (sometimes deliberately and
sometimes inadvertently) to revolutionary politics. Ultimately, while Fuller commits herself to
“the state of the people” or “state of the race” over “Art,” the artists and the writers she critiques
seem to profess just the opposite.
Fuller’s dispatches demonstrate, however, that this choice between politics and aesthetics
wasn’t as simple as she may have suggested in her early letter to Channing. In fact, this letter
will be crucial to our readings of Risorgimento-period and Unification-period Italophiles, for the
ultimatum she poses—between aesthetics and politics, between republican and anti-republican
sentiment—often infuses contemporary readings of her public (and occasionally her private)
correspondence and of larger issues they raise. Fuller’s dispatches have become, in many ways,
the mid-century meditation on republicanism: we often remember her for her devotion to
politics, especially to Italian politics, and we forget, in the process, that she was also a serious
student of aesthetics. Equally important is that this often mis-remembered ultimatum also
infuses contemporary readings of those Anglo-American expatriates who populated Italy during
5
For thorough discussions of these moments, see chapters one and three, where I discuss Fuller’s dispatches in
conversation with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi
Windows (1851) respectively. For specific examples of Fuller’s frustrations with expatriate artists and writers, see
especially dispatch 14 (written from Rome and dated May 1847; published in the New-York Daily Tribune on 31
July 1847); dispatch 15 (written from Rome and dated October 1847; published in the New-York Daily Tribune on
25 December 1847); and dispatch 29 (written from Rome and dated 20 March 1849; published in the New-York
Daily Tribune on 16 May 1849). Dispatches 14 and 29 catalogue the expatriates who lived in Rome and in Florence
and discuss whether they were or weren’t politically active. Dispatch 16 may be among the most damning critiques:
“Alas! I have the more reason to be ashamed of my countrymen, that it is not among the poor, who have so much
toil that there is little time to think, but those who are rich, who travel—in body, that is, they do not travel in mind—
absorbed at home by the lust of gain, the love of show, abroad they see only the equipages, the fine clothes, the
food—they have no heart for the idea, for the destiny of our own great nation: how can they feel the spirit that is
struggling now in this and others of Europe?” (Dispatches from Europe 154).
6
the Risorgimento and the Unification. For if Fuller has come to embody the un-nuanced
patriotism of a mid-century American-turned-Italian, then the artists and the writers who
populated Rome, Florence, and Venice during the Risorgimento and the Unification have been
read through her supposedly unequivocal terms. To follow this logic means that they are (like
Fuller) wholeheartedly committed either to mid-century politics or to mid-century aesthetics, that
their allegiances lie strictly with republicans or strictly with anti-republicans. Of course, as
Fuller’s 1847–1850 correspondence attests, most of the artists and the writers who populated
Italy were much more ambivalent than this mis-remembered but oft-mythologized choice
suggests—and Fuller was no different.
Still, because Fuller’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century readers often represent her as a
martyr for mid-century political commitment, she has been memorialized for her seemingly unnuanced allegiances to politics over aesthetics, to republicans over anti-republicans. That
Fuller’s allegiances to Italy were, in fact, much more complex is worth stressing: for while her
status as the martyr for mid-century political commitment heroicized her, it also damned her.
Indeed, this romanticized portrait often renders Fuller a shrill caricature of the person she reveals
herself to be, across both her private and her public letters from this period. In fact, throughout
her correspondence, Fuller shows how she was, in fact, less frustrated by the expatriates’
seeming commitment to aesthetics over politics than she was by the logic undergirding this false
dichotomy. When we keep this in mind, her 1847 letter is especially provocative, for her
ultimatum is equally false. Ultimately, it’s clear that she was committed to “Art” as much as she
was committed to “the state of the race” or “the state of the people,” even if she recognized, as
early as 1847, that these two devotions would often be in conflict with one another during her
Italian years.
7
Fuller scholarship has started to address her vexed relationships with expatriate artists
and writers only within the last decade. Heidi Kolk, above all, has suggested that Fuller was torn
between her long-standing passion for aesthetics and the pressing anxieties she expressed about
Italian politics across her private and her public letters from this tumultuous period. Kolk argues
that when we read the dispatches as records of Fuller’s unequivocal allegiances to Romans, to
Florentines, and to Venetians or as records of Fuller’s surrogate patriotism, we oversimplify her
internal debate—what I’m calling the ultimatum she poses between “Art” and “the state of the
people” or “the state of the race”—for the dispatches are, in fact, often critical of the leisure
class, even as they echo the leisure class’s rhetorical modes. Kolk studies Fuller’s dispatches
generically and shows how she balances public expectations with her own, much more private
realizations about present-tense Italy. “On the one hand, she urged the armchair travelers who
constituted her primary readership to new, de-metaphorized and de-mythologized view of
fashionable foreign scenes,” Kolk writes; “On the other, she produced accounts of her European
tour that conformed to conventions of bourgeois travel narrative, often capitulating to the most
well-worn clichés of the genre at precisely the moments when she sought most energetically to
cast them off in favor of some new, more passionate mode of discernment” (377). Fuller’s selfconscious negotiation became tantamount to posturing, Kolk contends, especially when she
addressed the “leisure” class to which the artists and the writers belonged (377–381). Fuller,
then, both is and isn’t one of the expatriates she disparages; and contemporary readers might find
the dispatches bewildering, in part because her interest in these expatriates is so self-conscious.
Indeed, Fuller’s professed disavowal of aesthetics may have seemed a necessary sacrifice for the
kind of civic conscience she wanted to inspire in herself.
8
Fuller’s unnecessarily easy division between “Art” and “the state of the people” or “the
state of the race” isn’t an anomaly. As noted, it’s become commonplace for readers to assume
many Risorgimento-era and Unification-era expatriates were faced with the same ultimatum.
When critics study 1840s–1890s Italy, they often catalogue the artists, the writers, and the new
waves of middle-class tourists apart from the unfolding—and parallel—events of the
Risorgimento and the Unification. When critics do trace expatriates’ sense of belonging in Italy
as something that transcends an arcadian cosmopolitanism, they often oversimplify expatriates’
political allegiances as unequivocal republicanism or unequivocal anti-republicanism.6 In the
rest of the dissertation, I place Margaret Fuller in conversation with Italophiles as disparate—or
seemingly disparate—as Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Vernon Lee, Effie Ruskin-Millais, and Henry James. Many of these figures are known now for
their devotion to the psychology of aesthetics (Eliot, Lee, and James, for instance) or for being
figureheads of opposing political perspectives (Hawthorne is a quintessential conservative/antirepublican; Barrett Browning is a quintessential liberal/republican), some are dismissed as
apathetic (Ruskin-Millais may be the most famous). Yet all of these writers contend with the
ways present-tense exigencies render “Art” insufficient in Risorgimento or post-Risorgimento
Italy; and they aren’t, then, as antipathetic to one another’s perspectives as we might assume.
Some may be more committed to aesthetics than to politics (or the other way around) or to
republican causes than to anti-republican causes (or the other way around).
Far from seeing Italy merely in conservative or in liberal terms, merely in arcadian terms,
or even with indifferent apathy, all of these writers demonstrate an often queasy disposition that
seems to have characterized the mood of the period. In widely varying ways, Hawthorne, Eliot,
6
For a classic reading of expatriate artists and writers as arcadians, see Van Wyck Brooks’s The Dream of Arcadia:
American Writers and Artists in Italy 1760–1915.
9
Barrett Browning, Lee, Ruskin-Millais, James, and Fuller contend with the inevitable tensions
between politics and aesthetics that expatriates often sought in vain to reconcile (or overlook)
during the Risorgimento and the post-Risorgimento periods. Far from separating into two
distinct “politicoaesthetic” schools of thought, then, all of these writers realize ambivalent
allegiances (to politics and to aesthetics, to republican forces and to anti-republican forces) as
they experience watershed moments firsthand: the First, the Second, and the Third Wars of
Independence, as well as the Unification of Italy, all of which I’ll turn to shortly.
By “politicoaesthetic ambivalence,” I mean the elision we can trace between AngloAmerican expatriates’ republican and anti-republican empathies and the often parallel elision
between their commitments to politics and to aesthetics. My aim in stressing politicoaesthetic
ambivalence is neither to temper their commitments (to republicanism or to anti-republicanism)
nor to valorize ambivalence (as something much more pardonable, in critical hindsight, than
apathy). It is, rather, is to demonstrate the ways that Italy complicated already difficult questions
for Anglo-American expatriates. For while these expatriates were already troubled by personal
questions of civic longing or belonging and political questions about the tenability of midnineteenth-century nations and nationalisms, the lingering presence of the “Italian Question”
across the second half of the nineteenth century forestalled any expectations for quick resolution
that they may have had in 1847–1848. In fact, we can imagine Fuller’s dismay that this
revolution lingered into the 1850s and the 1860s, even if her vision of a republic was realized
across the peninsula in 1871. (Part of her heartbreak in 1848–1849, after all, was that she saw
the unexpected making and the unexpected un-making of Italia within a very short period.)
Ultimately, for Fuller and for the other writers discussed in this dissertation, ambivalence was a
meaningful political sentiment because it encompassed the narrative, the metanarrative, and the
10
historiographic uncertainties that defined Anglo-American representations of Italy in the wake of
the Risorgimento and the Unification. As we’ll see, this writerly ambivalence seems to have
transcended expatriate allegiances, whether to party politics in the United States and the United
Kingdom, or, perhaps much more importantly, to explicit republican or to explicit antirepublican avowals. I argue that this ambivalent disposition may be read as a political statement,
even if that political statement amounts to a serious mediation on the equivocal patriotic
sentiment that suffuses this period.
By reading Anglo-American expatriates’ allegiances as ambivalent, I am upending a
deeply entrenched mythology among historians and literary historians alike: one that often
pigeonholes mid-century Italophiles into one of two distinct schools I have already outlined:
republicanism and anti-republicanism. Instead of reading Anglo-American expatriates along a
spectrum that stretches from, say, republican (liberal) on the left to anti-republican (conservative)
on the right, I argue that we ought to read them along a spectrum of politicoaesthetic
ambivalence. While this spectrum doesn’t negate the fact that some writers may be closer to
republicanism than to anti-republicanism in spirit, it reminds us that Anglo-American expatriates
rarely experienced political sentiment as one of two opposing worldviews. The writers I study
throughout this dissertation reveal empathies with Romans, with Florentines, or with Venetians
and, often at the same time, with the non-Italians (including the Catholic Church) who ruled
peninsular cities across the long nineteenth century.7 By revising the ways we catalogue
7
Anglo-American expatriates’ empathies with the French, with the Austrians, and with the Piedmont-Sardinians
were often affected by the attitudes of their homelands. Between the late 1840s and the late 1850s, support for
Italian revolutionaries wavered both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, not only because Rome,
Florence, Venice, and the rest of the peninsula seemed frighteningly unstable, but also because the U.S. and the U.K.
had separate relationships with the non-Italian forces that controlled what was to become the United Kingdom of
Italy. Widespread support for Italy wasn’t fully realized until the late 1850s, when the Unification ended the
Risorgimento. Throughout the 1840s and the 1850s, however, journalists in the U.S. and the U.K. helped to
popularize figures who are now known as revolutionary heroes; the most famous are Giuseppe Mazzini; Giuseppe
Garibaldi; and Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, who are cited often as a triumvirate but who weren’t
11
Italophiles’ ties to Italy, and often to a particular region in Italy, we will be able to discern much
more nuanced polticoaesthetic allegiances than earlier schemas have allowed. We may learn to
read Fuller and Barrett Browning, say, without necessarily pitting them against Hawthorne and
Ruskin-Millais or against Eliot, Lee, and James.
In the rest of this dissertation, I study politicoaesthetic ambivalence in fiction, in
nonfiction prose, and in poetry written between 1848 and 1892. The six body chapters study
texts by Anglo-American expatriates who address, or pointedly don’t address, the Risorgimento
and the Unification of Italy. The ambivalence these writers associate with Italy is important, not
just because it upends allegiances we might normally understand as simply republican or as
simply anti-republican, but also because it challenges the ways we read the mood of the period
and the ways we define the emerging nineteenth-century nation-state. Though some of the texts
are characterized by moments of unequivocal republicanism or anti-republicanism, the
characters’, the narrators’, and the authors’ politicoaesthetic temperaments are often much more
elusive. By the end of the century, Italy became a nerve center for renderings of statehood,
nationhood, and civic belonging; this nexus for the patriotic imaginary inspired writers to place
politics, aesthetics, and often misguided humanitarian desires in unexpected conversation.
Before turning to a discussion of the mythology of the Risorgimento and the Unification
of Italy, I will position my argument about politicoaesthetic sentiment within existing
conversations about politics, aesthetics, and mood that extend beyond the nineteenth century.
Within the last decade, many cultural historians have shifted our focus from what people believe
ideologically bound to one another. For a thorough discussion of the ways the Risorgimento and the Unification of
Italy affected domestic policy in the United States (especially during the 1840s and the 1850s), see for example
Paola Gemme’s Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity.
For a thorough discussion of the ways these two historical moments affected “political imagination” in the United
Kingdom, especially in England, see for example Maura O’Connor’s The Romance of Italy and the English Political
Imagination.
12
to how they think and feel when they articulate political realizations. For instance, Kenneth
Weisbrode has published a meditation On Ambivalence subtitled The Problems and Pleasures of
Having It Both Ways just this year.8 He argues that ambivalence may be the defining mood in
the United States (and perhaps across the rest of the world) at present, since Americans are
contending with the untenability of two-party perspectives in an increasingly global world.
Weisbrode’s pithy distillation of twenty-first-century ambivalence seems especially relevant in
light of the parallels many people have traced between the Spring of Nations in 1848 and the
Spring of Nations in 2011. While it is dangerous to suggest that the Spring of 1848 and the
Spring of 2011 mirror one another, the summers of both years arrived without political resolution
for many people.9 Weisbrode’s argument that our present moment is defined by Americans’
unwillingness to commit—or willingness to commit only half-heartedly—to foreign policy may
be helpful for even the most cautionary readings of parallels between 1848 and 2011, for he
reminds us that impasses between thinking, feeling, and doing often define revolutionary
moments (1–12). Yet Weisbrode recognizes that this kind of indecision isn’t something that
people, especially Americans, valorize.
8
Weisbrode defines ambivalence in three ways: “There exist several varieties of ambivalence. The man who
invented the term, Eugen Bleuler, identified three: the love-hate relationship, focused upon a single object; the
inability to choose (or to imagine a choice) between desires, or needs; and the simultaneous attachment to
incompatible or contradictory ideas, or beliefs. All tend to blur in practice. Moreover they reflect ‘inner
experience,’ in the words of the sociologist Robert Merton, and have little to do, at least explicitly, with society and
with the particular tension between our impulses and the roles society assigns to them. For Merton and others like
him (notably Norbert Elias), the resulting sublimation of the multitude by the individual constitutes the essence of
ambivalence. It is in our collective behavior, however, that ambivalence perhaps has its greatest impact. It
‘diffuses’ and worsens as it becomes more general or abstract” (11–12).
9
In fact, countless news media began comparing the Arab Spring to the Spring of Nations as early as February
2011. Almost immediately, many journalists and academics began critiquing these often hasty comparisons, arguing
that 1848 and 2011 were, in many ways different and, perhaps much more importantly, that it’s irresponsible to
project Western narratives onto the Middle East. Between the springs of 2011 and 2012, many more critics have
voiced concerns about the potential for journalists’ to render the revolutions spectacle and even sites for academic
tourism. At present, these comparisons and these critiques span from highbrow to lowbrow outlets. For a sensitive
argument about why we shouldn’t read 1848 and 2011 through one another, see Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “Every
Revolution Is Revolutionary in Its Own Way” (published in The New York Times on 26 March 2011).
13
In this context, Sianne Ngai may be, then, Weisbrode’s most important predecessor, for
her affect catalogue Ugly Feelings puts politics and aesthetics in conversation with one another.
Ngai’s definition of “ugly feelings” is useful for foregrounding my argument that this mood is
“lingering,” “ongoing,” and “non-cathartic” (7, 6). Ngai discusses the importance of “lingering”
or of “ongoing” moodiness to the political contingency of “ugly feelings,” and she claims that
this sense of irresolution often renders ugly feelings “amoral and noncathartic” (7, 6). Ngai’s
language seems especially apt for Fuller, who was always writing with Emerson and with
Carlyle in mind, and who was, then, always concerned about how she could effect change
through what she was thinking, feeling, and writing. Indeed, her pleas for Americans to support
the Roman and the Florentine Revolutions were always couched in arguments about the moral
potential Italian patriots embody. For Fuller, then, the act of writing about what she was
thinking and feeling about these revolutions was, in many ways, a cathartic experience; but it
was, much more importantly, a cathartic experience she hoped would translate to action on the
part of Americans overseas. Fuller’s critics have long suggested that both her public and her
private letters are guarded to the point of being off-putting. Yet the tender line she establishes
between expressing and not-quite-expressing her emotional world is an important rhetorical
tactic. For Fuller’s torn allegiances to “Art” and to “the state of the people” and “the state of the
race” could easily be termed both “amoral and noncathartic,” to borrow Ngai’s coinage (7, 6).
Ngai “turns to ugly feelings to expand and transform the category of ‘aesthetic emotions,’
or feelings unique to our encounters with artworks—a concept whose oldest and best-known
example is Aristotle’s discussion of catharsis in Poetics. Yet this particular aesthetic emotion,
the arousal and eventual purgation of pity and fear made possible by the genre of tragic drama,
actually serves as a useful foil” for the ugly feelings that constitute her work (6). Unlike
14
classical aesthetic emotions, which often lead to “morally beatific states” of being, Ngai shows
how ugly feelings “are explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue,
however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release. In fact, most of these feelings tend to
interfere with the outpourings of other emotions” (6–7). Though she does not discuss
ambivalence, her argument about the political contingency of “ugly feelings” has helped me to
theorize the often uncomfortable encounters between politics and aesthetics that are, I argue,
crucial to nuanced close readings of the period. I suggest, though, that this strange lingering,
ongoing, and perhaps non-cathartic mood doesn’t necessarily thwart the possibility of “morally
beatific states.” It is, rather, representative of widespread cultural debates about whether the
United States, the United Kingdom, and especially Anglo-American expatriates have a duty to
act on behalf of Italians.
While my aim isn’t to corroborate historical fact—it is to study the mood of the period
through some of the fiction, the nonfiction, and the poetry written by Anglo-American
expatriates—I will trace they ways the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy have become
historiographical or mythological spectres in late-nineteenth-century literature. For this reason,
before I turn to why historians and literary historians now interpret the Risorgimento and the
Unification of Italy in terms of nineteenth-century grand narratives, I would like to do two
things: first, explain pre-Risorgimento and pre-Unification definitions of Italia; second, outline
the major events that took place between from 1848 to 1870, the period I discuss in chapters 1, 3,
and 5 (the first halves of the Rome, the Florence, and the Venice diptychs).
People called Italy Italy long before March 1861, when Vittorio Emanuele II proclaimed
the peninsula to be a kingdom: The United Kingdom of Italy. For the word Italia, as Denis
Mack Smith reminds us, has been used “not so much for a nation as for a peninsula”; and, as
15
David Gilmour reminds us, the word dates back as far as Greek mythology (Smith 1; Gilmour
8).10 In fact, there was no single Italian capital, language, law, or even monetary unit until after
the Unification of Italy in 1861.11 When the Austrian Chancellor, Prince Klemens Wenzel von
Metternich, dismissed Italy as “une expression géographique” in 1847, he was, in many ways,
dismissing Italians’ efforts to unify the peninsula as a nation during the first half of the
nineteenth century. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Smith and Gilmour both begin with
Metternich’s infamous quotation in the first chapters of their books. Gilmour argues that this
1847 bon mot likely sounds so haughty because on the eve of 1848, “Italy may have been more
than a geographical expression—though it was still divided into eight independent states—but
Metternich was repeating a view widely held for more than 2,000 years: Italy, like Iberia, may
have been a geographical unit with natural borders but it had not been united since Roman times
and did not seem to require political unity now or in the future” (7–8).
10
“Italy,” Gilmour writes, “seems to begin with the myth of Hercules, the Greek hero who rescued a stray calf that
had wandered across southern Italy and swum the Straights of Messina. The land the animal crossed duly became
known as Italia, from the word ouitoulos or bull-calf, a word that has also bequeathed us, via Oscan and Latin, the
word vitello or veal. A related theory, recorded by the Greek historian Timaeus, held that the ancient Greeks had
been so impressed by the cattle in Italy that they had rewarded the land with the same name” (8). Gilmour’s The
Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (2012) is the most recent revisionist history of
Italy, and it is, Gilmour acknowledges in the introduction, indebted to Smith’s Italy: A Modern History (1859),
which many consider to be the first and the most influential revisionist history of Italy. Smith’s book focuses
attention on post-1861 history, though he outlines the moments leading up to the Risorgimento and the Unification
of Italy in his introduction. Gilmour’s book covers 2,000 years of Italian history, but, as he confesses in his
introduction, it questions the importance or the seeming importance of 1861 to Italian cultural memory. Gilmour’s
chapters about the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy may be near the middle of the book, but they
foreground many of Gilmour’s primary questions.
11
Students of romance languages remind us that as late as the 1880s and the 1890s, Italian dialects were so different
that people across The United Kingdom of Italy often couldn’t understand one another when speaking what some
might still call Italian. While this linguistic history isn’t unique to Italy (similar patterns unfold in France and in
Spain, for instance), Italy’s fraught geopolitical history seems to have exaggerated the problem of language.
Gilmour cites an anecdote that shows how loaded this linguistic confusion was, at least in cultural memory: “Even
in 1861, at the time of unification, some Sicilians thought L’Italia—or rather La Talia—was their new queen. A full
century later, the social reformer Danilo Dolci encountered Sicilians who had never heard of Italy and asked him
what it was” (9–10).
16
Still, Smith and Gilmour remind us that this Austrian Chancellor’s slight was grounded in
some truth.12 For the Italian peninsula is isolated from the rest of the continent in many ways:
on one side are the Alps; on the other three sides are the Adriatic, the Ionian, the Mediterranean,
and the Tyrrhenian Seas.13 Because the peninsula is isolated geographically from the rest of the
continent, Smith argues, Italy didn’t follow the same political trajectory as much of Western
Europe between the early 1600s and the early 1800s: that is, it didn’t transition from city-states
to nation-states. (Smith cites Italy’s differences from France and from Spain in particular.) The
Italian Peninsula was, consequently, vulnerable to foreign occupations, since emerging nationstates were, in many ways, much more powerful than city-states with ever-shifting borders. In
fact, during the Middle Ages, there were as many as eighty city-states across the peninsula.
Most of these remained intact from the early 1600s to the early 1800s, though they had been
reconstituted again and again through non-Italian occupations and through alliances with other
Italian city-states.
By the end of the eighteenth century, most of northern Italy was controlled by the
Austrian Habsburgs and most of southern Italy belonged to the French Bourbons and to the
Spanish. “In between,” the northern and the southern regions, Smith continues, “right across
from sea to sea, stretched the states of the Church, where the Pope ruled as a supranational
sovereign, a solid barrier against national unification. Spain, France, Austria, and the Pope
would scarcely look sympathetically on any movement in any foreseeable circumstances” (7–8).
Smith’s précis on the events leading up to the Risorgimento and the Unification reminds us that
12
“There were indeed some advantages in being ‘a geographical expression,’” writes Smith: “Metternich’s own
Central European empire was not even that, and Austria-Hungary was to be broken in pieces by the new nation
states, of which Italy was among the largest and most dangerous” (5).
13
Smith opens his history with a paragraph about the line “une expression géographique”: “It has always been
historically important that the Apennines divide Italy from top to bottom and that the Alps cut her off from the rest
of Europe; mountains may not be removed, even by faith” (1).
17
this history was often violent, which may be why these mid-nineteenth-century events were
forestalled for so long. For between the “supranational” powers of the Pope and the Catholic
Church; the powers of city-states across the peninsula; and the French, the Spanish, the
Austrians, and later the Piedmont-Sardinians, Italian people couldn’t contend with the possibility
of realizing their nation-states on their own until the first half of the nineteenth century.14
Most historians (both those before and after Smith) agree that Italian people—as well as
the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, and the Piedmont-Sardinians—mobilized for the
Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy in the wake of the French Revolution. “It was with the
Napoleonic intrusion into Italy, between 1796 and 1814, that the various regions of the peninsula
were forced back into the mainstream of European history,” writes Smith (8). By this, he means
that Italian people were forced to contend with the shift in European powers from city-states to
nation-states. For the peninsula was first unified by France—as a short-lived Kingdom of
Italy—just one generation before the Risorgimento and the Unification.15 In the wake of the
1814 Congress of Vienna and the 1814–1815 Restoration, Smith argues, crucial “nonpolitical”
14
In fact, Smith writes, northern and southern “Italy had hardly ever been united under the same rule, but
government had for centuries been parceled out between autonomous cities and foreign dynasties, all of whom had
an interest in resisting every patriotic movement not led by themselves and suppressing any neighbor who became
too important” (6).
15
Smith argues that the period between 1796 and 1815 is important, because The Kingdom of Italy Vittorio
Emanuelle II proclaimed in 1861 has an antecedent in Napoleonic Italy: “Napoleon even created a prototype
kingdom of Italy based on Milan” (Smith 8). Ultimately, this kingdom may have been a political failure (Smith calls
it a “puppet state”). Yet it did effect ideological and technological changes necessary for later revolutions:
“Napoleonic armies brought with them the germs of liberalism fostered by the French Revolution of 1789, and
introduced a minor industrial revolution sufficient at least to provide some of the war equipment required.
Experience of Napoleonic rule convinced some people how much Italy stood to gain from strong centralized
government” (8). After the fall of Napoleon and Napoleonic rule, his provisional Kingdom of Italy “split up again
into its constituent elements,” and the French-inspired laws were “repealed” across the Italian city-states (8). Smith
argues that Italian people remembered Napoleon ambivalently. “Most Italians were glad to be rid of him,” Smith
argues, “less because he was a ‘foreigner’ than because heavy taxes and conscription were obnoxious, and because
they hoped that the milder government of pope or duke would be less interfering and easier to disobey” (8). “In one
real sense,” Napoleon’s “legacy was one of division, in that he brought north Italy still further within the economic
ambit of France” (8). “This notwithstanding,” Smith concludes, “shortly after Napoleon’s final defeat the German
scholar Niebuhr could write from Rome that Italy was bound to be united in the course of a generation or two, and
Stendhal in his diary noted the same trend. That such a revolution was at least conceivable is to be ascribed largely
to Napoleon’s influence. It is significant so many leaders of Italian nationalism descended from people who became
rich under his regime” (8–9).
18
changes across the peninsula primed Italians both for the Risorgimento and for the Unification of
Italy. While the Austrian Habsburgs, the French Bourbons, and the Spanish may have regained
political control in the north and in the south, Napoleon’s tenure across the peninsula inspired
ideological and technological changes that transcended these empirical purviews. It’s telling that
this change is understood as “nonpolitical,” apart from liberal and from conservative reforms,
and often apart from Italian people themselves. Historians before and after Smith have discussed
the period between 1815 and 1848 in terms of a change in mentalité: a French word for a French
moment.16 Smith glosses the Italian mentalité as italianità:
There was a feeling of italianità which thinkers were beginning to rationalize and
statesmen to exploit. There was the liberating wind from the French Revolution
blowing freely through the world with its message of political deliverance. There
was also an expanding commercial and agricultural middle class with new needs
generated by an industrial revolution and by the revival of trade routes in the
Mediterranean. (9)
Indeed, the first half of the nineteenth century was punctuated by revolutionary unrest across the
peninsula: the condottieri, the carbonari and La Giovine Italia were among the nascent
organizations through which later heroes, including Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi
would rise in the decades preceding the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy. These
organizations remained powerful through the 1840s and the 1850s: even Napoleon III was
rumored to be a carbonari as late as the First and the Second Wars of Italian Independence.
16
Elsewhere, Smith terms this a “national consciousness,” and he argues that it wasn’t sustained until the first half
of the nineteenth century: “Some national consciousness had certainly existed on and off for centuries, but it had
been vague and tenuous, something manifested only in the wilder speculations of a Dante or a Machiavelli, and
many had argued on the contrary that national unity would be ruinous rather than profitable, as well as morally
wrong. Not much national feeling had in fact existed before the nineteenth century, and even an Italian customs
union like the German Zollverein was impracticable until Piedmont could impose it” (5–6).
19
Uprisings in 1820–1821 and in 1830–1831 are often included in histories of the Risorgimento
and the Unification of Italy, though most date the start of the mid-century revolutions in 1848.
Most discussions of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy (including Smith’s and
Gilmour’s), however, span from 1848 to 1870. Ultimately, the two decades between these two
years saw the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, which may be understood as
overlapping flash points. Both are, in many ways, lingering, ongoing, or even suspended events:
the word Risorgimento is usually associated with what some term the First, the Second, and the
Third Wars of Italian Independence; and the word Unification is usually associated with the
Second and the Third Wars.17 With all this in mind, let me proceed to a chronological overview
of the period, outlining what happened during and after the First, the Second, and the Third Wars
and how each of the wars is now read as a part of the grand narrative linking the Risorgimento
and the Unification.
Within the context of the Unification of Italy, the First War refers to the uprisings of
1848–1849 in Rome, in Florence, in Venice, and in city-states across the rest of the peninsula.
Many of the uprisings against the Austrian Habsburgs and against the French Bourbons were led
by revolutionaries who were inspired by the condottieri, the carbonari or La Giovine Italia, and
who had been provoked by leaders (often Piedmont-Sardinian leaders) competing for peninsular
authority. 1848 was, of course, a watershed year across the rest of the continent. Indeed, the
revolutions across Italian city-states (especially those in Rome, in Florence, in Venice, and in
Milan) were fully realized in many ways: civic guards were granted, republics were proclaimed,
and constitutions were written and published before the people. These civic guards, republics,
and constitutions occurred only after Pope Pius IX issued his historic motu propio (papal
17
In the body chapters, I discuss the First, the Second, and the Third Wars in some detail in the context of the
fiction, nonfiction, and poetry I’m addressing.
20
rescript) on 10 February 1848: “Benedite Gran Dio l’Italia!” (“O Lord God, bless Italy!”).
Many people, Italians and non-Italians alike, believed that this papal rescript was tantamount to a
papal blessing of the revolutionaries and of the revolution that Europeans were realizing was on
the horizon. For the Pope’s papal rescript was a sign that he was acting in the fullness of his
power, and many assumed he was anointing Italia-the-peninsula as Italia-a-nation (Markus,
Casa Guidi Windows 102). Italian republics and constitutions lasted from the Spring of 1848
until the Spring of 1849. Soon thereafter, however, monarchs in the south withdrew their
support of the republics and the constitutions under the pressure of constitutional ministers in
Rome, in Florence, in Venice, and in Milan; and Pius IX fled the Eternal City. Between April
and June 1849, the French army occupied Rome, allowing the Pope to return and declare the city
a protectorate of the Catholic Church. By the end of the year, Rome, Florence, Venice, and
Milan were again under Austrian and under French rule.
Lucy Riall has termed 1848/1849–1858/1859 the “decade of preparation” (29). Between
the First and the Second Wars of Italian Independence, tensions heightened among the French,
the Austrians, the Piedmont-Sardinians, the Italians, and the Catholic Church. By 1858, the
French (headed by Napoleon III) and the Piedmont-Sardinians (headed by Cavour) were plotting
to overthrow the Austrians and the Catholic Church and to consolidate their power over the rest
of the peninsula not already under their control. Knowing that the revolutionaries were still
mobilized in the wake of the short-lived republics and constitutions of 1848–1849, Napoleon III
and Cavour secretly agreed to work in tandem with one another and to incite the revolutionaries,
not because they supported the Italians but because they were trying to undermine the Austrians.
Ultimately, the Austrians declared war on the Piedmont-Sardinians, allowing the French to
intervene. Consequently, the Austrians, the Piedmont-Sardinians, and the French fought two
21
gruesome battles, on 4 June 1859 and 24 June 1859, at Magenta and at Solferino respectively.
Napoleon III was so horrified that he met with the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I (without
Cavour’s consent) on 11 July 1859 and signed the Treaty of Villafranca. Angered by the AustroFrench Treaty, Cavour and the Piedmont-Sardinians remained at war with the Austrians, and
they pressed from the north southward to the central states, where they ultimately gained control
of Tuscany, of Parma, and of Modena.
By December 1859, Tuscany, Parma, and Modena joined with some of the smaller
central states and with the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, in order to form the United Provinces
of Central Italy. Four discrete states existed, then, across the peninsula as a whole: Venetia
(controlled by Franz Joseph II), the Papal States (controlled by the Pope), the Kingdom of
Piedmont-Sardinia (controlled by Victor Emmanuel II), and the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (the
Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples, controlled by Francis II). During the spring and
the summer of 1860, Garibaldi led his I Mile army from the south northward, meeting the
Piedmont-Sardinians in central Italy. Though the Papal army forestalled the Piedmont-Sardinian
and the I Mile armies, it was finally defeated. By March 1861, Vittorio Emanuele II (the former
King of Piedmont-Sardinia) proclaimed a United Kingdom of Italy. Rome and Venice were the
only city-states that remained un-unified across the peninsula: Rome belonged to the Pope and
the Catholic Church; Venice belonged to Franz Joseph I and the Austrian Empire.
For five years, the United Kingdom of Italy remained at relative peace with the Austrians,
the French, and the Catholic Church. In 1866, Venice was annexed to the United Kingdom of
Italy during what is called both the Third War of Italian Independence and the Austro-Prussian
War: Vittorio Emanuele II allied Italians with Prussians against Austrians, hoping to unite the
rest of the peninsula (not under the authority of the Pope) through this diplomatic arrangement.
22
Because Franz Joseph I had promised to cede Venice to Napoleon III in return for recusing the
French from the Austro-Prussian War, Napoleon (not Vittorio Emanuele II) was granted
authority first; he quickly ceded Venice to Vittorio Emanuele II, since Vittorio Emanuele had
already granted Nice and Savoy to the French during the Second War. Rome, then, was the lone
un-unified city on the peninsula. Italian historians often cite the Franco-Prussian War as the final
turn in the century-long Risorgimento and Unification processes. Rome was finally annexed to
the United Kingdom of Italy in the fall of 1870 after the Battle of Sedan, where the French were
defeated by the Prussians. In the wake of this defeat, the Italian army breached the Aurelian
Wall at Porta Pia and defeated the Papal army on 20 September 1870: Vittorio Emmanuel II
officially annexed Rome to the kingdom in October 1870 and officially proclaimed it the capital
in July 1871.
It’s tempting to read the First War, the Second War, the Third War/the Austro-Prussian
War, and the Franco-Prussian War as a continuous narrative with a dramatic, even a
melodramatic, denouement: the unification of the peninsula. Yet these wars were motivated by
the interests of nation-states, empires, and supracivic figureheads—the French, the Austrians, the
Piedmont-Sardinians, the Prussians, and the Catholic Church—as much as they were by the
Italians themselves. For this reason, revisionist historians (including Smith, Riall, and Gilmour)
and literary historians (George Eliot critic Andrew Thompson is one of the most notable) have
argued that contemporary studies of the Risorgimento and the Unification are shrouded in
nostalgic grand narratives. Indeed, as early as 1959 (the centenary of the United Provinces of
Central Italy), Smith urged Italophiles to be skeptical of a seemingly intractable historiographical
or mythological assumption undergirding the study of the peninsula: that the Unification of Italy
was both the aim and the consequence of the Risorgimento. Smith reminds us that the First, the
23
Second, and the Third Wars, as well as the conflicts before and after this tumultuous decade,
weren’t fought in order to unify the peninsula as a single nation-state. For the French, the
Austrians, the Piedmont-Sardinians, the Prussians, and the Catholic Church, they were fought in
order to maintain a presence on the peninsula. For the Italians, however, they were fought in
order to liberate various city-states from these nation-states, empires, and supracivic figureheads.
Since 1959, two schools of revisionist historians have emerged. Among the first is Riall,
who interprets the Risorgimento as the turning point in nineteenth-century Italian history.
Among the second is Gilmour, who interprets the Unification as the turning point. Both remind
us, though, that the Unification of Italy wasn’t, as Smith argues, the aim or the consequence of
the Risorgimento. Both are interested in tracing what Smith terms the nascent sense of italianità
(nationalism or patriotism) that emerged during the second half of the nineteenth century. Riall
and Gilmour would likely agree that this italianità isn’t bound to the mythology linking the
Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy. Rather, it developed alongside the events defining
both periods. Riall, however, cautions against revisionist interpretations that separate the
Risorgimento and the Unification too hastily, since this critical turn has rendered the presence of
nineteenth-century italianità inconsequential. Riall argues that over the last two decades,
historians have “rejected both the liberal ‘grand narrative’ of nationalist triumph and the Marxist
counter-narrative of failed revolution, and challenged the Risorgimento’s iconic status as the
major turning point in modern Italian history” (Risorgimento vii). “In so doing,” historians have
“abandoned the attempt to explain its (even partial) success” (vii). “A major problem with this
revisionist approach,” Riall concludes, “is that its vivid and complex portrayal of an Italy in flux,
caught between tradition and modernity and firmly based on regional economies and municipal
identities, ignored the concomitant growth in Italy of a nationalist culture and politics” (vii).
24
Gilmour argues, on the other hand, that this “nationalist culture and politics” may not
have existed in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries—and it still may not exist. In fact, he
confesses that he wrote this book because he wondered “whether the unification of Italy had
been either a necessary or a successful enterprise [ … and] whether Italians might have been
better off divided into three, four or even more states” (3). “Italians seem,” Gilmour continues,
“to be internationalist and (in a good sense) provincial but not nationalist except when their
leaders forced or cajoled them into being so” (3).18 Gilmour extends Smith’s now classic
revisionist argument that the Unification of Italy wasn’t the necessary aim or the necessary
consequence of the Risorgimento:
Traditional histories of Italy had been written from a centripetal view, as if Italian
unity had been pre-ordained. I wanted to look at the peninsula’s centrifugal
tendencies and inquire whether the lateness of unification and the troubles of the
nation state had been not accidents of history but consequences of the peninsula’s
past and its geography, which may have made it unsuitable territory for
nationalism. Were there not just too many Italies for a successful unity? (3)
Ultimately, then, Gilmour warns us to abstain from interpreting the lingering, ongoing, and
suspended events that took place between 1848 and 1870 in terms of linear histories and linear
historiographies.
In the pages that follow, I argue that questions of historiographical representation in fact
absorbed Anglo-American expatriates in the years just after the Risorgimento and the Unification
18
Gilmour then compares the nineteenth-century emergence of the Italian nation-state— and the fall of the
Venetian and the Florentine city-states—to twentieth-century geopolitical tragedies: “In any case nations are not
inevitable, as the people of Kurdistan well know, and sometimes their creation is so artificial that, as with
Yugoslavia, they simply fall apart. In today’s Europe, which contains so many successful small nations, there surely
would have been room for a flourishing Tuscany, perhaps the most civilized state of the eighteenth century, and a
prosperous Venice, a once great republic with a thousand years of independent history” (3).
25
Italy. In chapters 2, 4, and 6 of this dissertation (the second halves of the Rome, the Florence,
and the Venice diptychs), the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy in fact surface—often
quite subtly—as mythological spectres to the characters who contend with the traumas of the
mid-century revolutions intellectually and spiritually through their geographical displacements to
Rome, to Florence, and to Venice. At the same time, these characters’ sojourns dramatize
difficult metanarrative problems. Between 1871 and 1892, many Anglo-American expatriates
seem preoccupied with the historiographical crises their characters inevitably face in Italy.
These Anglo-American expatriates ask us, then, to consider not just what their characters
experience in Italy but how their characters experience history in Italy. In turn, these postRisorgimento, post-Unification texts pose many of the same representational questions Smith,
Riall, and Gilmour outline in their revisionist histories: is it really possible to write or to re-write
historical memory for the tumultuous period from 1848 to 1870—almost in the immediate wake
of lingering, ongoing, and perhaps yet suspended events such as the Risorgimento and the
Unification of Italy? What is now known as a grand narrative, the story that the Unification of
Italy was the inevitable, even the “pre-ordained,” conclusion to the Risorgimento, isn’t present in
nineteenth-century representations of this period, and that may be why many of the texts I study
are predicated on the unnarratability of 1848–1870. For in at least half of the texts I study, the
narrative turning points are set in Rome, in Florence or in Venice, yet these Italian moments are
but single chapters, single volumes, or seemingly outlying letters.
Ultimately, then, this dissertation is very specifically about Italy; but it is also subtly
about the ways that Italy upended Anglo-American expatriates’ ideas concerning what a nation
and a nationalist worldview are at the middle and at the end of the century. For as Fuller so
often reminds us, Italy was an anomaly in many ways, not just because it carried an arcadian
26
mythology, but also because it had resisted being or becoming a nation-state for so long. Italy’s
regional identities continued to be as important as its ultimate status as a kingdom and as a
nation: we still witness vestiges of this today when we experience regional dialects, foods, and
family traditions among Italians and Italian Americans. Indeed, as early as 1851, Neapolitan
historian Luigi Blanch contended that “‘the patriotism of the Italians is like that of the ancient
Greeks, and is love of a single town, not of a country; it is the feeling of a tribe, not of a nation.
Only by foreign conquest have they ever been united. Leave them to themselves and they split
into fragments’” (qtd. in Smith 5). Tellingly, Blanch writes in the third-person plural, not the
first-person singular or plural, when he describes “patriotism,” suggesting that this concept may
be foreign to mid-nineteenth-century Italians in crucial ways. Still, the sustained convergence of
single towns with international and supranational powers guaranteed that Italians were never
isolated, even if their sense of civic belonging was to a city-state, not to a nation-state. Italia,
then, persisted as a place that wasn’t defined by the aesthetics or the geopolitics of Italia alone.
The six body chapters are organized into three diptychs that prioritize the sustained
importance of Italian cities across the second half of the nineteenth century: Rome, 1848–1870
and Rome, 1871–1892; Florence, 1848–1870 and Florence, 1871–1892; and Venice, 1848–1870
and Venice, 1871–1892. Each of the diptychs covers its city first during the Risorgimento and
the Unification, and second immediately after these monumental events. As I move from city to
city, I study the shifting empathies that Anglo-American expatriates trace in their fiction,
nonfiction prose, and poetry. In some cases, these shifting empathies manifest as direct, selfconscious expressions of ambivalence. In others, Anglo-American expatriates contend with the
almost-present-tense spectres of the Risorgimento and the Unification through seemingly oblique
forms: sculptures, paintings, and crises of historical/historiographical representation. For this
27
reason, when we read Eliot’s, Lee’s, and James’s subtle treatments of mid-century Italy in the
context of politicoaesthetic ambivalence, we may come to see their concerns with the boundaries
of historical/historiographical representation as extensions of the earlier generation’s concerns.
Hawthorne, Barrett Browning, Ruskin-Millais, and Fuller pave the way for later expatriates’
ambivalent mnemonics; the effect of this process is further to blur the republican/anti-republican
divides so many critics have discerned in Anglo-American letters from 1848 to 1870.
In the epigraphs to this dissertation, both Fuller and Eliot describe the “consciousness” or
the “double consciousness” so familiar to travelers: the worry that the sense of illumination
Fuller and Eliot experience in the present-tense will dissipate over time in the future, and their
appreciation of this place will be lost somehow. Ultimately, the double-nature of my studies of
Rome, Florence, and Venice seeks to capture Anglo-American expatriates’ efforts to forestall
this seemingly inevitable mnemonic dissipation, since they wrote during the years just after the
Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy.
In chapter one, I put Fuller and Hawthorne in conversation with one another, and I study
how both address the representational dilemmas that painters and sculptors faced during the First
and the Second Wars of Italian Independence. Though we normally read Fuller as a staunch
republican and Hawthorne as a staunch anti-republican, my close readings suggest that this
distinction is oversimplified. For in The Marble Faun (1860), Hawthorne shows how his
characters are haunted by unnarratable events: in fact, two of the main characters, a painter and
a sculptor, become preoccupied with the problem of representing their “momentary
circumstances” in clay, in marble, or in paint. I argue that this ongoing conversation, coupled
with subtle references to the French occupation in Rome during the 1840s and the 1850s, may be
read as a meditation on historicity, one that is deeply inflected by the Risorgimento and the soon-
28
to-be Unification of Italy. In chapter two, I turn to Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), and I
discuss the Rome chapters of that novel as crucial chronological and geographical displacements
in this famous Study of Provincial Life. I argue that the Rome chapters aren’t just important to
the plot of the novel (Dorothea’s transition from Miss Brooke to Mrs. Casaubon and even to Mrs.
Ladislaw); they are also important because they reveal to us what she thinks, feels, and realizes
about her own life and about history.
Chapters three and four study Florence. In both, I study characters who experience the
tragedies of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy as mothers. In chapter three, I argue
that the mother-poet in Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851) experiences a surrogate,
if ambivalent, sense of patriotism when she witnesses (through the windows of her house) what
one critic has termed the “palinodic” processions of 1847 and 1849: first, the formation of the
Florentine civic guard in September 1847, and second, the arrival of the Austrian army in May
1849. Here, I argue that Barrett Browning’s double poem isn’t as bifurcated as many critics have
suggested. Instead of reading the “discrepancies” between parts one and two as a flaw in Barrett
Browning’s aesthetics or politics or as a testament to her naïveté, I read them as a self-conscious
meditation on polticoaesthetic ambivalence. In chapter four, I turn from Barrett Browning to
Lee, and I study “The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” a tale she included in Vanitas: Polite
Stories (1892). Lee’s “polite story” is also a ghost story, one that seems to haunt the
historical/historiographical boundaries of Barrett Browning’s poem. Sora Lena haunts Madame
Krasinska (a vaguely American/vaguely French woman), who acquires a portrait of her because
she recognizes the Florentine woman’s face. Sora Lena is a fixture in post-Risorgimento, postUnification Florence: she sings Garibaldi’s hymn every single day at the train station, where she
awaits the return of her two sons who died at Solferino during the Second War of Italian
29
Independence. Because Madame Krasinska is haunted by Sora Lena, she is also haunted by Sora
Lena’s ghosts. I argue that this story shows how Lee contends with ghosts from a not-so-distant
past in order to intimate the dangers of cosmopolitan cultural memory in the wake of the local—
and the unnervingly personal—tragedies that defined Florence long after the Risorgimento and
the Unification were fully realized.
In the final diptych, I study Venetian letters written during the First and after the Third
Wars of Italian Independence. Chapter five focuses on Ruskin-Millais’s letters to her mother,
her father, and her brother. Chapter six focuses on Hyacinth Robinson’s to the Princess
Casamassima in James’s second “political” novel. In chapter five, I trace Ruskin-Millais’s often
complicated allegiances to Austrians, to Venetians, and to Milanese people, arguing that she
wasn’t as fickle as her first husband’s biographers have long suggested. The ambivalence she
describes throughout her 1849–1850 stay in Venice (the first of two; the second was from 1851–
1852) should be understood, rather, as a meaningful expression of politicoaesthetic sentiment,
one that is much more aligned with Fuller’s and Barrett Browning’s than even feminist
biographers have allowed. I end with The Princess Casamassima, one of two “political” novels
in James’s canon (both published in 1886). Like Eliot’s Dorothea and Will, Hyacinth is
obsessed with history, historiography, and the meaninglessness of plots (and, ultimately, grand
narratives). Like Lee’s Sora Lena and Madame Krasinska, Hyacinth is haunted by mid-century
ghosts, especially his French namesake, Hyacinthe Vivier, who died in 1848. In this final
chapter, I argue that Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy are the lingering, the suspended,
and the ever-present, if unarticulated spectres behind Hyacinth’s politicoaesthetic crisis: should
he—or shouldn’t he—assassinate a duke for the people? Venice is the place where Hyacinth
experiences an existential crisis that forces him to reconcile his allegiances to politics and to
30
aesthetics. In many ways, then, he embodies the ultimatum Fuller first poses in her 1847 letter to
Channing. By the end of the century, it’s clear that this ultimatum hasn’t dissipated in its affect
on Anglo-American expatriates’ consciences. Rather, it reaches a fever pitch.
31
CHAPTER 1
Rome, 1848–1870
“Intervals between Two Breaths”: Crises of Repose from Fuller to Hawthorne
One of the most unnerving things about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860)
is its seeming disinterest in the political events that defined Italy between 1858 and 1859, the
period when he was travelling between Rome and Florence, and the period when he first drafted
his final romance.19 The publication of The Marble Faun coincides with a turning point in midnineteenth-century Italian history, for if we remember 1848–1849 to be the First War of Italian
Independence, then 1858–1859 is the Second.20 Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Italy
for almost two years between January 1858 and May 1859, following their four-year post in
England, where he was the American Consul in Liverpool. Just six months after Hawthorne left
Rome for Boston and then for Concord, most of central Italy joined the United Provinces of
Central Italy (December 1859), and by January 1860, only four regions of the peninsula
remained un-unified: the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia; the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (the
19
The novel was published in England (by Bernhard Tauchnitz as The Transformation: Or, The Romance of Monte
Beni) one week before it was published in the United States (by Ticknor and Fields as The Marble Faun: Or, The
Romance of Monte Beni).
20
Lucy Riall, in fact, calls 1849–1859 “‘the decade of preparation,’” since the United Provinces of Central Italy,
which was proclaimed in December 1859, realized the cries for independence that erupted across the peninsula
during 1848–1849 (Risorgimento 25). “The ascendency of modern liberalism in Piedmont between 1849 and 1859
is often referred to as ‘the decade of preparation,’” Riall writes, a term that “reflects the importance of this decade
for the growth of Italian nationalism and, eventually, the unification of Italy” (29). When Tuscany, Parma, and
Modena joined with the Papal Legations to form the United Provinces of Central Italy at the end of the year, the
Papal States (and Rome) remained conspicuously un-unified, since they were still under the absolute rule of the
Pope, Pius IX, who French forces had been protecting since the First War of Italian Independence.
32
Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples); the Papal States (including, most notably,
Rome); and Venetia (including, most notably, Verona and Venice).21
In fact, the battles that most historians cite as the turning points in the Second War
(Magenta on 4 June 1859 and Solferino on 24 June 1859) took place while Hawthorne was in
transit from what was becoming the United Provinces of Central Italy to the United States. By
the time Hawthorne had returned to Massachusetts, then, Central Italy was on the cusp of
realizing independence and unification (or partial unification, since Rome wasn’t annexed to the
Kingdom of Italy until October 1870). Hawthorne witnessed many of the events immediately
preceding the Magenta and the Solferino battles, and while he doesn’t overtly dwell on them in
The French and Italian Notebooks (1858–1859) or in The Marble Faun, they are still present.
Indeed, The Marble Faun isn’t unequivocally republican, unequivocally anti-republican, or,
perhaps much more importantly, as oblivious as Hawthorne critics have long suggested to the
mid-nineteenth-century revolutions that defined central Italy at this moment.
Hawthorne scholars began thinking of his historical romances in terms of “ambivalence”
or “narrative ambivalence” as early as 1970, and they often focus attention on the ways The
Marble Faun is inconclusive or indecisive, at least in terms of plot.22 While most critics assume
that this novel is a fictional exposition of Hawthorne’s post-England, post-Italy politics and
aesthetics, they often argue that it is apolitical or political only insofar as it dramatizes his late
21
For a much more thorough discussion of the Second War of Italian Independence, see Lucy Riall’s Risorgimento:
The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (chapter 1) and David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy: A History
of a Land, its Regions, and their Peoples (chapter 7).
22
For readings of Hawthornean ambivalence in tales from the 1830s and the 1840s, see Walter Paulits and Mark
Estrin, both of whom include “ambivalence” in the titles to their articles. Louie Jo Taylor Howze’s unpublished
dissertation, Patriotic Ambivalence: A Study of Hawthorne’s Abortive English Romances, studies the period just
before his Roman residence. For less sustained discussions of ambivalence/narrative ambivalence in The Marble
Faun, see Jeffrey Meyers; Nancy Bentley; Rita Gollin and John Idol, Jr.; Robert Byer; Udo Nattermann; Mark
Kemp; Susan Williams; Susan Manning; and Brenda Wineapple. The continued interest in this term across forty
years of scholarship is telling. Since critics have used ambivalence to mean different things, ranging from
inconclusiveness or indecisiveness to political disillusionment, it seems appropriate, now, to revisit these meanings,
to suggest why critics return to the term over and over again, and to suggest why The Marble Faun is a crucial text
for the subject.
33
leanings toward conservatism and toward anti-republicanism. In fact, we have come to
understand Hawthorne’s conservatism and anti-republicanism largely through his unflattering
characterizations of Margaret Fuller’s republicanism much more than we have through sustained
analysis of The French and Italian Notebooks or The Marble Faun, which rarely address the
Risorgimento un-obliquely.
While Fuller became increasingly vocal about the important parallels between American
and Italian republicanism, Hawthorne became less explicitly patriotic (across his fiction and
nonfiction and in his private life) as he grew older. Many read Hawthorne as a writer who turned
from being more to less patriotic, or whose mid-century conservatism seems too nostalgic for
analyses that stress other (often much more “progressive”) strains in his historical romances. I
argue that this kind of continuum oversimplifies Hawthorne’s politics, and it unnecessarily
distances him from his contemporaries, including Fuller.23 For by comparing the rhetoric Fuller
and Hawthorne use to describe the importance of art and artists to mid-nineteenth-century Rome,
we can trace politicoaesthetic echoes between the two writers that transcend conventional
dichotomies (she was a revolutionary and he wasn’t; she wearied of art and artists, while he was
often transfixed by Italian masterpieces).24 In fact, Fuller’s ultimatum between “Art” and “the
23
Hawthorne’s politics evolved across his twenty-five-year career, and his literary oeuvre reflects these ideological
shifts. Hawthorne first garnered attention with his patriotic tales of the 1830s and the 1840s. In 1850, 1851, and
1852, he wrote his most celebrated triumvirate: The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, and The Blithedale
Romance. In 1853, Hawthorne secured a position as the consul to Liverpool after writing Franklin Pierce’s
campaign biography, and he traveled to France and Italy between 1857 and 1859, once Pierce’s term had ended.
Many suggest that he was, by then, a disillusioned expatriate, though he always considered this residence abroad to
be temporary. Still, critics often frame studies of Hawthorne’s politics through his connection to the Emerson
family’s historic home. Hawthorne wrote Mosses from an Old Manse (1846) in the same room of the same house
where Emerson wrote Nature (1836); the room overlooks The Old North Bridge, where the first shots of the
Revolutionary War were fired on 19 April 1775. While Mosses from an Old Manse and The House of Seven Gables
clearly suggest the manner in which Hawthorne curates narratives of the American Revolution through the houses
themselves, his later fiction addresses historical upheavals less palpably.
24
To be sure, in The French and Italian Notebooks, Hawthorne mocks Fuller’s legacy precisely because he
believed her dedication to the Risorgimento was “ridiculous” (156). Nearly eight years after Fuller’s death,
Hawthorne writes that the sculptor Joseph Mozier said “Margaret had quite lost all power of literary production,
before she left Rome, though occasionally the charm and power of her conversation would re-appear. To his certain
34
state of the people” or “the state of the race” prefigures the ambivalence many mid-century
expatriates—including Hawthorne—demonstrate as they struggle to reconcile aesthetics and
politics. As we’ll see, The Marble Faun reveals a much more tempered, though not less
controversial, politicoaesthetic ambivalence than Fuller’s. For just as Fuller repeatedly questions
the relevance, or the irrelevance, of “Art” to the Risorgimento, and just as her politicoaesthetic
temperament is much more ambivalent than we often assume, at least at first, Hawthorne, too,
alludes to the Risorgimento and to the Risorgimento’s historic/historiographic illegibility through
Art; and his politicoaesthetic temperament is, too, much more ambivalent than we often assume.
Indeed, Hawthorne’s narrator seems to present the Risorgimento as an unnarratable
subject. Perhaps because of this, Hawthornean ambivalence seems to be an ineluctable subject
for readers of The Marble Faun. In this chapter, I argue that The Marble Faun, a romance many
have assumed to be apathetic to “the state of the people” or “the state of the race,” actually
extends Fuller’s complicated discussions of “Art,” especially since sculpture, like, fiction, poses
fundamental representational dilemmas. Consequently, it’s often difficult to tell whether the
text’s near silence over the Risorgimento marks Hawthorne’s politics, Hawthorne’s narrator’s
politics, or whether the implied author is asking us to be critical of the characters’ muted
obliviousness about what was happening in Rome at the moment when Hawthorne was drafting
and publishing this novel. I argue that this doubly ambivalent stance is as political as Fuller’s
overt appeals, for it shows how hesitant people were to articulate a future for the republic (or
non-republic) between (what we now know as) the First and the Second Wars of Italian
knowledge, she had no important manuscripts with her when she sailed, (she having shown him all she had, with a
view to his procuring their publication in America;) and the History of the Roman Revolution, about which there
was so much lamentation, in the belief that it had been lost with her, never had existence. Thus there appears to
have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence
was, after all, kind in putting her, and her clownish husband and their child, on board that fated ship. There was
never such a tragedy as her whole story; the sadder and sterner, because so much of the ridiculous was mixed up
with it, and because she could bear anything better than to be ridiculous” (The French and Italian Notebooks 156;
this entry was written from Rome and dated April 1858).
35
Independence. The oblique quality of The Marble Faun, then, isn’t evidence of Hawthorne’s
conservatism, anti-republicanism, or indifference to his historical moment. Instead the expatriate
characters’ sustained discussions about what can and cannot be rendered in clay, in marble, and
in paint may be read as discussions about mid-nineteenth-century “Art” that place politics and
aesthetics in uncomfortable conversation with one another.
Over the last decade, scholars have noted Hawthorne’s near silence over Risorgimento
history, but they often assume it to be a veiled opinion on the future union or disunion of the
United States or as a result of his solipsistic interest in museum culture abroad. When
Hawthorne died on 19 May 1864, the American Union had not yet been definitively preserved.
Hawthorne scholars often seem to read this fact as prophecy, as they suggest that it is tantamount
to his historiographic aesthetics during the post-England, post-Italy years. For as Hawthorne’s
politics became more and more implicitly “conservative” and his romances less and less
explicitly “patriotic,” their narrative trajectories also seemed to tend toward inconclusiveness.25
Many critics have insinuated that this tendency parallels the sense of historic uncertainty
Hawthorne may have felt when he returned from Rome to Concord, where he witnessed the first
four years of the Civil War.26 American wars certainly haunt The Marble Faun, but what if we
25
For readings that discuss inconclusiveness in The Marble Faun (or in Hawthorne’s unfinished works, The
Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, and Doctor Grimshawe's Secret), see Michael Dunne; Millicent Bell; Susan
Manning; Brenda Wineapple; Emily Miller Budick; and Robert Hughes.
26
Critical interest in Hawthorne’s politics tends to focus attention on his concern—or non-concern—over the Civil
War. Nancy Bentley, Robert Levine, Millicent Bell, Blythe Ann Tellefsen, and Arthur Riss are among the critics
who argue that this book addresses U.S. history circuitously. For these critics, Italy appears as a euphemistic
imaginary, a place where Hawthorne could fictionalize mid-century political anxieties and envision the tenability of
statehood and nationhood in the United States. Bentley argues that for Hawthorne, America “could best be
represented in absentia” during the 1850s and the 1860s (931). It appears as “a conceptual place” in The Marble
Faun and is “defined only by an implied contrast with (America’s) Italy” (931). Bentley, Levine, Tellefsen, and
Riss read Hawthorne’s depiction of Italy as an oblique meditation on antebellum America. Levine argues that The
Marble Faun displaces “cultural tensions in a foreign setting that, during the antebellum period, would have
invariably prompted Americans to think about America. It would not be inappropriate to call that foreign setting, a
cultural construct, ‘antebellum Rome’” (20). Bentley and Riss compare the faun in Hawthorne’s romance to a slave
(who he describes as a faun) in “Chiefly about War Matters” (1862). These interpretations suggest that the “faun” is
a euphemism for blackness or non-whiteness, and they often place this reading in conversation with existing debates
36
read the romance not just as a study of American wars but as a subtle meditation on
contemporary Italy?27
For even more relevant than the uncertainties looming in America from 1861 to 1865
were the uncertainties Hawthorne surely witnessed in Rome from 1858 to 1859, just before he
returned to Concord. In 1858–1859, Rome was defined by the yet-unresolved consequences of
the transcontinental 1848–1849 and 1858–1859 revolutions. During the summer of 1858,
Napoleon III (who had belonged to the Carbonari in the 1830s and who had recommitted himself
to Italian nationalism during the 1840s and the 1850s) met with Camillo Benso, the Count of
Cavour in Plombières, where they signed the Patto di Plombières, a pact that marked their secret
commitment to war against Austria. At their meeting, Napoleon III and Cavour agreed to divide
the territories they would gain in central Italy by overthrowing Austria. Consequently, as early
as the fall of 1858, Cavour provoked the Austrians by inciting Italian revolutionaries in
Lombardy. Austrians remained unexpectedly patient with these Piedmontese-inspired
revolutions. Ultimately, without the Austrians’ expected reprisal, Napoleon III and the French
could not intervene; and without the French, Cavour and the Piedmontese couldn’t risk a much
more overt attack on Austria. Eventually, however, the Austrians demanded that the
about Miriam’s vague national/transnational identity. For a bibliographic overview of scholars who read Italian and
American dis/unions together, see Richard Brodhead’s and Susan Manning’s introductions to The Marble Faun (the
Penguin and the Oxford editions respectively). For connections between the Civil War (especially the Confederacy)
and Italy, see Don Doyle’s Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question.
27
If the first generation of New Historicists (Bentley, et al) read Hawthorne’s Italy as an allegory for antebellum
America, recent scholarship has criticised Hawthorne’s, and Hawthorne’s critics’, potentially “expansionist” rhetoric
(Kemp 210). Mark Kemp argues that this tendency to interpret Italy only conceptually resonates with American
expansion during the 1840s and the 1850s, which seems to have extended Manifest Destiny overseas. He shows
how Hawthorne’s “stateless and apolitical subjectivity [. . .] suggests a radically unstable national narrative that both
worries over the demise of the nation-state—the United States—and endorses the imperial vision that will sustain it”
(210). “Hawthorne’s Rome contains no events or people,” Kemp continues, “only a chiaroscuro space for the [. . .]
expansionist, imagination” (210). For if Hawthorne replaces an indirect meditation on Italy with an even more
indirect meditation on the United States, his historical romance glosses Italian people even as gestures toward their
real existence. This shift in Hawthorne scholarship still focuses attention on America; however, critics like Kemp
invite us to understand Italy as Italy and Italian people as Italian people, not just as American specters, since they
consider Hawthorne’s transnational potential.
37
Piedmontese demilitarize Lombardy, where many of these Piedmontese-inspired revolutions had
taken place. When the Piedmontese refused to demilitarize, they had legitimate reason to
undermine the Austrians’ authority in the region. By April 1859, the Piedmontese and the
French, led by Cavour and by Napoleon III, finally declared war on Austria. Between April and
May 1859, then, while Hawthorne was preparing to return home, the Italo-French campaign was
defending the Eternal City from Austrian invasion. In fact, he left Rome in May 1859, just as
Vittorio Emanuele II was forcing the Papal army from Castelfidardo to the Vatican.28 While
Hawthorne drafted The Marble Faun between 1858 and 1859 in Rome, he prepared the
manuscript during the summer of 1859, once he’d returned to the United States and just at the
moment when Cavour, Napoleon II, and Franz Joseph I were negotiating a war—on behalf of
republicans and anti-republicans alike—that re-drew the boundaries of the peninsula.29 He
published The Marble Faun in 1860, just after the United Provinces of Central Italy had been
declared, while living at the Wayside in Concord.
Hawthorne critics who read The Marble Faun apolitically or politically (as a fiction of
conservatism or of anti-republicanism, not as a mediation on ambivalence) often focus attention
on art, or even the manner in which art renders Rome the ideal setting for detemporalized
Hawthornean Romance.30 Critics have long argued that this classicist nostalgia effaces presenttense Rome, and they have interpreted Hawthorne’s treatment of the Risorgimento to be a
28
For detailed accounts of 1858–1859, see Riall, Risorgimento (especially pages 29–36 in chapter 1) and Gilmour
(pages 176–209 in chapter 7).
29
Though Austria was defeated both at Magenta and at Solferino, the 4 June and 24 June battles were so horrifying
that Napoleon III (who had personally led troops into the battles) sought peace. On 11 July 1859, Napoleon III met
with Franz Joseph I (without the Piedmontese and without Cavour), and they agreed that the Austrians would retain
Venetia but they would cede Lombardy to the French, who would then cede it immediately to the Piedmontese (the
Austrians refused to cede Lombardy to the Piedmontese directly). Because Napoleon III hadn’t sustained his secret
agreement with the Piedmontese, he didn’t gain Savoy and Nice as he and Cavour had originally plotted. Still, the
Sardinians (who oversaw Piedmont and Savoy) were outraged by Napoleon III, and the Piedmontese remained at
war with the Austrians. By December 1859, the Piedmontese had guaranteed much of Central Italy’s independence
from Austrian and from French rule.
30
For readings that focus attention on art, art history, and Hawthorne’s aestheticized representations of “the real,”
see Rita Gollin and John Idol, Jr.; Robert Byer; Neill Matheson; Millicent Bell; Todd Onderdonk; and Jonah Siegel.
38
knowing dismissal.31 It’s possible that we shy away from reading Hawthorne’s ambivalent
treatment of the Risorgimento as serious political commentary since his most famous American
contemporaries explicitly confront it.32 For if Fuller’s dispatches address the Italian Question
overtly, worrying over the manner in which Anglo-Americans prioritize politics and aesthetics,
then Hawthorne’s treatment of the Risorgimento is defined by a much more nuanced
circumlocution. The Risorgimento is present, but just barely present, in the characters’ political
consciousnesses, and though Hawthorne alludes to contemporary events throughout The Marble
Faun, he never represents the Risorgimento directly.33 There are just two well-discussed
allusions to contemporary Rome in The Marble Faun: Miriam’s possible involvement in the
Risorgimento and Hawthorne’s references to the French soldati who occupied the city from 1849
to 1859.
31
Michael Gilmore and Arthur Riss distill the tendency to oversimplify Hawthorne’s politics: to exaggerate his
progressivism or to exaggerate his conservatism. “The consensus on Hawthorne and politics goes something like
this,” Gilmore writes, “unlike Emerson and Thoreau, unlike Douglass and Stowe, activists all, he was an inactivist
who fetishized deferral” (22). Riss addresses critical interest in Hawthorne’s treatment, or non-treatment, of slavery:
“If one line of argument sees Hawthorne’s interest in aesthetics as blinding him to politics, the other argues that
Hawthorne invokes the aesthetic to blind others to political realities. The latter view is the one currently in vogue;
Hawthorne is regularly indicted for a ‘derealizing style,’ a mode of representation that incites a relentless
‘indeterminacy’ about the substance of politics and thus mystifies the possibility of concrete action” (252). “Where
once Hawthorne had no politics,” Riss continues, “all he has now is bad politics. Where once Hawthorne simply
wanted to avoid the real world, he now is regarded in more insidious terms, considered to be intentionally
misrepresenting the real world” (252).
32
His most famous contemporaries, Fuller and Herman Melville, were much more outspoken about the
Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, and they were well-known for their republican allegiances, while
Hawthorne was and is generally known as an anti-republican expatriate. Hawthorne distanced himself from Fuller
by the late 1840s and from Melville by the late 1850s. For comparisons between Hawthorne’s and Melville’s
treatment of the Risorgimento, see Dennis Berthold and Richard Hardack. Rather than “describing the Italy of the
day, a revolutionary land rushing toward national liberation,” Hawthorne “fell back on the Arcadian formulas
popular since the seventeenth century” (Berthold 141–142). He also pits Protestantism against Catholicism and,
Berthold argues, romanticizes Pope Pius IX’s suppression of the Risorgimento. Berthold contends that this romance
is “hopelessly out of touch with Italian life”: “By 1859 no republicans, American or Italian, believed the pope could
unify Italy” (142). For Berthold, the novel’s silence is, then, twofold: if it addresses the Risorgimento, it tells a
story of suppression, but it also tells the story of suppression through a self-silencing narrative. The Marble Faun is,
then, an “antirepublican” work (142). “For Hawthorne,” Berthold concludes, “art collaborates with political power
to suppress revolt” (143).
33
John Carlos Rowe notes that “Hawthorne makes consistently superficial observations about the great political
events taking place around him” in The French and Italian Notebooks, his source text for this romance (98). “The
Italian nationalists Cavour, Garibaldi, and Mazzini are not even mentioned,” Rowe continues, and “Hawthorne
makes only brief references to Napoleon III and to the papacy” (98).
39
These allusions have been crucial for understanding Hawthorne as a transatlantic and a
transnational figure. Still, as John Carlos Rowe reminds us, in order to appreciate the global
significance of Hawthorne’s work, and of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism much more
generally, we must consider reciprocities that transcend neat parallels (between nations,
nationalisms, or other historical patterns), and we must stress the way American writers came to
articulate citizenship through their global experiences.34 Following Rowe, I suggest that the
Risorgimento affects the characters’ very ideas about historic or historiographic representation
throughout The Marble Faun. By focusing attention on muted references to the Risorgimento, I
bridge Hawthorne scholarship about art and art history with interpretations that are overtly
political. At the same time, this chapter shows how mutedness seems to have defined AngloAmerican interpretations of the Risorgimento. Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun is, then, an
important companion piece to Charles Dickens’s Pictures from Italy (1846) and John Ruskin’s
The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) (which I discuss in chapters five and six), which also evade
discussions of contemporary politics.35 Hawthorne’s silence may be, in fact, much more
34
Rowe’s essay reads The Marble Faun specifically, but it also challenges Hawthorne scholarship to distinguish
between expatriatism or nationalism overseas and transnationalism. Rowe writes that Hawthorne “teaches us an
important lesson often lost in more recent discussions of transnationality: to go beyond the ‘nation’ is not merely to
connect with other nations, but to consider the great variety of different social formations and personal identities
excluded by a particular nation and nationalism in general” (90). Rowe suggests that Hawthorne is “especially
worthy of reconsideration” today because of his conservatism and because of “his ability to ‘Americanize’
international and transnational issues in this manner that makes him relevant to our present situation” (88–89).
Rowe’s prescient essay reminds us that just as scholars have warned against the parallels some have drawn between
the 2011 Arab Spring and the 1848 Spring of Nations (these parallels are often Eurocentric), literary critics must be
careful not to conflate civil wars in American and Italian states.
35
In Pictures from Italy, Dickens writes that he won’t catalogue history or art history, and he won’t address rumors
about civic unrest among Italians, Austrians, and the French. Instead, Dickens pronounces the importance of
narrative silence, for British people and Italian people alike: he refuses “any grave examination into the government
or misgovernment of any portion of the country,” since “no visiter to that beautiful land can fail to have a strong
conviction on the subject” (1) “I chose when residing there, a foreigner,” he continues, “to abstain from the
discussion of any such questions with any order of Italians, so I would rather not enter the inquiry now” (1).
Dickens’s silence over the looming revolution extends to art, to the pictures and the statues he saw during his tour of
Italy. Just as he addresses his silence over Italian politics in the opening paragraphs of his travelogue, he also
addresses his silence over art: the “pictures” of his title refer to the “impressions” he had of the place, not the
masterpieces he saw in the studios or the museums he also visited. Dickens writes that there probably isn’t “a
famous Picture or Statue in all Italy, but could be easily buried under a mountain of printed paper devoted to
40
representative of Risorgimento-era texts than not. The Marble Faun is populated with the very
artists Fuller critiques in the dispatches: they travel from studio to studio, forming enclaves of
American communities in the Roman piazzas, rarely even noting the appearance of Italian faces
in the crowded streets they inhabit. Hawthorne’s characters arguably revive stereotypes of the
artists and the writers Fuller codified as early as her 1847 letter to Channing, though it’s clear
Hawthorne didn’t find these artists and writers to be as insular as Fuller did.
The Marble Faun is often criticized for straying from a plot, even a meandering plot, and
tending instead toward traveloguesque descriptions of art. On the surface, the first two chapters
do just this: the narrator sets self-consciously halting descriptions of the characters and the
statues they encounter against a sustained, if much more abstract, meditation on the fleeting
present. In the very first sentence, the narrator focuses our attention on a sculpture that embodies
the threshold between living and not living, permanence and impermanence: “Four individuals,
in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the
saloons of the sculpture-gallery, in the Capitol, at Rome. It was that room (the first, after
ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the
Dying Gladiator, just sinking into the death-swoon” (Hawthorne, The Marble Faun 5). It’s clear,
as early as this first sentence, that the narrator is cagey. He directs the four characters’ gazes
toward the marble gladiator, as if to index the plot or to suggest that this figure is as important as
the individuals named in the chapter title, “Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello.” While we don’t
learn anything about the characters themselves, the grammar of the sentence prefigures the
chapter’s structure, the romance’s structure, and the ongoing mood. For just as Latin grammar
privileges the final word in a sentence, the narrator delays “the death-swoon,” further
dissertations on it,” so he won’t “expatiate at any length on famous pictures and statues” (1). He does record his
“impressions” of The Dying Gladiator and Beatrice Cenci; both of these are central to The Marble Faun.
41
dramatizing the marble gladiator’s anticipatory potential. Hawthorne locates the statue with
guidebook precision, but the nested restrictive clauses are meandering and disorienting. Still, it’s
unclear why the narrator directs, or misdirects, our attention to The Dying Gladiator in the
opening passage, or why the “four individuals” pause fleetingly over this statue before studying
The Faun of Praxiteles.
In the first two chapters, the characters wander through the Capitol, and they become
deeply interested in Donatello’s uncanny resemblance to “the faun.” While the narrator delays
provisional descriptions of Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello, he lingers over their
collective response to this statue:
The resemblance between the marble Faun and their living companion had made a
deep, half-serious, half-mirthful impression on these three friends, and had taken
them into a certain airy region, lifting up—as it is so pleasant to feel them lifted—
their heavy, earthly feet from the actual soil of life. The world had been set
afloat, as it were, for a moment, and relieved them, for just so long, of all
customary responsibility for what they thought and said. (16)
Just as the narrator withholds cursory descriptions of Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and even the faunlike Donatello, he also withholds cursory descriptions of The Faun of Praxiteles. Instead, he
remains committed to the theme of ephemerality, suggesting that we might understand the “four
individuals” through their abstract moodiness. Though we don’t have a context for their
moodiness, we do have a vague catalogue of what they’re thinking and feeling in this particular
“moment” (and even the fact that they don’t want to claim “responsibility” for their half-hearted
“impressions”).36 The narrator’s desire to put words to impressions is all the more jolting, since
36
Wineapple notes the that characters’ names oddly bookend the first and the last chapters, which only emphasizes
their static identities: “Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and the Count of Monte Beni, a.k.a. Donatello: Hawthorne uses the
42
the characters’ immediate responses to the statue are offhand: they are “half-serious” and “halfmirthful.” For if we are to know these characters, the narrator suggests, then we must know how
they experience art and how it affects the way they think, the way they feel, and the way they
understand immediacy.
Though the narrator’s presentation may be disorienting, meandering, and even jolting, it
shows how he generalizes the characters’ moment-to-moment “impressions.” He digresses from
a description of “the four individuals” in the first chapter and again from a description of “the
four persons” in the second (6). Both times, he lingers instead over the striking difference
between the permanent and the impermanent bodies he sees in the Capitol. “It might be,”
Hawthorne writes, “that the four persons, whom we are seeking to introduce, were conscious of
this dreamy character of the present, as compared with the square blocks of granite wherewith
the Romans built their lives. Perhaps it even contributed to the fanciful merriment which was
just now their mood” (6–7). Just as the narrator turns, in the very first sentence, from “Miriam,
Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello” to the statuary “death-swoon,” the characters are suspended here
within the narrator’s historical imagination (5). He turns from a half-hearted gesture toward “the
four persons” in the introductory clause to a much more abstract meditation on the Capitol’s
stony remains; and though it’s an abstraction he tentatively ascribes to them, they still recede
from our focus by the end of the sentence. The narrator’s distractions continue throughout the
rest of The Marble Faun: he continues to delay and to withhold identifying information about
the characters (especially Miriam), creating a state of perpetual anticipation.
four characters to structure this long, discursive book. The first and last chapters bear their four names, as if to say
that events in between have changed all of them. Regardless, there is something abstract about the novel, something
inert: too much change amounts to stasis, it seems; and so it is with character, like that androgynous faun carved in
marble” (321).
43
His overwrought abstractions are even more striking against the characters’ bemused
interest in the marble faun. At first, these passages (about “the past” and “the present”) seem to
reinforce the characters’ vision of Donatello as the mid-nineteenth-century faun, but the narrator
is often out-of-touch with their immediate impressions. For example, when the characters are
looking at The Faun of Praxiteles, the narrator editorializes: “The foregoing conversation had
been carried on in a mood in which all imaginative people, whether artists or poets, love to
indulge. In this frame of mind, they sometimes find their profoundest truths side by side with the
idlest jest, and utter one or the other, apparently without distinguishing which is the most
valuable, or assigning any considerable value to either” (16). On the one hand, the narrator
really may be interested in how their “profoundest truths” exist side-by-side with their “idlest
jests.” On the other hand, the narrator seems to be commenting, coyly, on his own relationship
to the characters. For if we understand their playful interest in the marble faun as an idle jest,
then the narrator’s abstractions would be profound truths.
However self-conscious these truisms may be, the narrator’s gloss primes the reader for
the philosophical turn in the characters’ conversation when they shift their attention from The
Faun of Praxiteles to The Dying Gladiator. The Faun of Praxiteles may be the more obvious
touchstone for Hawthorne, but The Dying Gladiator spurs a provocative conversation about what
is and isn’t an appropriate “sculptural subject” (16). Just before we overhear the conversation,
the narrator challenges Kenyon, suggesting that his interest in this statue is momentary or selfimportant. “It might be under this influence,” Hawthorne writes, “(or perhaps because sculptors
always abuse one another’s works,) that Kenyon threw in a criticism upon the Dying Gladiator”
(17). The narrator’s equivocations (“It might be” this, “It might be” that, coupled with the
“perhaps” parenthetical) suggest that this encounter is mere happenstance. These equivocations
44
also forestall our own serious “criticism” of the statue. Indeed, the narrator’s hesitating
mannerisms before The Dying Gladiator dramatize Kenyon’s and Miriam’s diverging
interpretations of it.
Both Kenyon (a sculptor) and Miriam (a painter) sense an unnatural anticipation in the
statue. He confesses that this figure isn’t as compelling as it once was. “‘I used to admire this
statue exceedingly,’” Kenyon tells Miriam,
“but, latterly, I find myself getting weary and annoyed that the man should be
such a length of time leaning on his arm, in the very act of death. If he is so
terribly hurt, why does he not sink down and die, without further ado? Flitting
moments—imminent emergencies—imperceptible intervals between two
breaths—ought not to be incrusted with the eternal repose of marble; in any
sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill, since there must of necessity
be a physical one. Otherwise, it is like flinging a block of marble up into the air,
and, by some trick or enchantment, causing it to stick there. You feel that it ought
to come down, and are dissatisfied that it does not obey the natural law.” (16)
Kenyon knows that this statue is supposed to represent “‘eternal repose,’” but he struggles to
reconcile his textbook knowledge with what he thinks and feels when he sees the statue in situ.
The narrator suggests that this “criticism” may be inspired by Kenyon’s ego, but his comment to
Miriam seems to be much more complicated. Kenyon realizes that the figure is tense in the
moment of his final inspiration, but he is also aware of his impending death. For Kenyon, this
self-awareness betrays the subject’s “imminent” circumstances. Still, he is interested in The
Dying Gladiator because it embodies a representational dilemma: how can a sculptor represent
movement, especially subtle movement, with a medium that necessitates weighty fixedness?
45
Kenyon doesn’t say much about the statue itself, but he is frustrated that it “does not obey the
natural law” (16). The gladiator looks as if he’s about to stand up, not fall down, or as if he’s
using the weight of his body to brace himself. While his arms press his shoulders back, he leans
his head forward, a gesture that intimates his cerebral potential. Still, if the gladiator’s bent head
asks the viewer to think what he’s thinking, then the rest of his body resists such empathy. As
Kenyon tells Miriam, the gladiator’s right arm doesn’t seem weight-bearing, and his left arm is
touching his right thigh, not the earth, making his fall seem unnatural. The Dying Gladiator’s
unnatural fixedness lies, then, in its “eternal” tentativeness between standing and falling, not in
its supposed “repose” (17).37
The Dying Gladiator also unsettles Kenyon because it embodies the tentative state
between two breaths that forever postpone death. Kenyon doesn’t believe that this statue fulfills
its cathartic potential, for while it captures its subject at the cusp between living and not living,
the arms and the legs look too fixed to be “imminent” (17). While Kenyon feels self-consciously
“weary,” his comment shows how he thinks about the sculptor’s work empathetically. Visitors
to the Capitol knew that this statue was not supposed to glorify the gladiator’s tenacity. Since
they were to view The Dying Gladiator from the perspective of the victor (the Greeks or the
Romans, not the Gauls), they would have praised the beauty of his fall. Yet Kenyon, sensitive to
the technical realities of sculpting and chiseling, realizes that this statue inevitably memorializes
strength in the face of death, if only because the figure’s arms and legs are made of marble.
37
Henry James mocks the seriousness of the statue’s “repose” in Roderick Hudson (1875) through a conversation
between Roderick and Mr. Leavenworth. When Mr. Leavenworth commissions Roderick to complete a statue for
him, he asks, half-kiddingly if it will be “‘in the style of the Dying Gladiator?’” (240). “‘Oh no,’” Roderick says
“seriously”: “‘he is not dying, he is only drunk!’” (240). “‘Ah, but intoxication, you know,’” Mr Leavenworth tells
Roderick, “‘is not a proper subject for sculpture. Sculpture should not deal with transitory attitudes’” (240).
Roderick’s and Mr. Leavenworth’s next lines make it clear James had Hawthorne in mind—and was mocking The
Marble Faun as much as he was mocking The Dying Gladiator. “‘Lying dead drunk is not a transitory attitude!’”
Roderick asserts; “‘Nothing is more permanent, more sculpturesque, more monumental!’” (240). “‘An entertaining
paradox,’” Mr. Leavenworth curtly returns, “‘if we had time to exercise our wits upon it’” (240–241).
46
Kenyon’s frustration—that this stone tries to represent something fleeting with something
fixed—suggests his larger preoccupation with representations of tentativeness throughout the rest
of the novel. What seems at first to be a technical critique (that this statue doesn’t represent the
gladiator’s death believably) is, in fact, much more fundamental.38 Kenyon contends that
sculptors shouldn’t represent discrete moments with stones, for by trying to suspend the present
tense, they necessarily temper the immediacy their subjects require.
Despite these deep reservations, Kenyon continues to worry over “imminent” or
“imperceptible” aesthetics. The hesitating quality of Kenyon’s speech emphasizes his claim that
sculptors shouldn’t represent urgencies, especially subtle urgencies, since marble dulls the
emotional weight of their work. For Kenyon, this is as important as technical beauty: “in any
sculptural subject, there should be a moral standstill, since there must of necessity be a physical
one” (16). His pauses also emphasize the very sense of anticipation he struggles to describe:
“—imminent emergencies,” “—imperceptible intervals between two breaths,” and “—ought not
to be incrusted with the eternal repose of marble.” It’s clear Kenyon hasn’t yet fully articulated
his ideas about sculptural historicity, but his tongue-in-cheek impatience with The Dying
Gladiator is a telling interpretation, one that reveals his character and his ideas about art as much
as it describes the statue itself. 39 Kenyon’s concerns with the statue—how the figure does and
38
Kenyon’s response to The Dying Gladiator parallels the representational dilemma Dante Gabriel Rossetti poses
the first sonnet in The House of Life (written from 1849 to 1880 and published from 1868 to 1881), where he calls
the sonnet “a moment’s monument” (line 1).
39
Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne may be the most famous sculptural study of narrative/metanarrative
fixedness. Though Kenyon and Miriam don’t discuss Apollo and Daphne, their interpretations of The Dying
Gladiator echo Hawthorne’s frustration with Bernini. On 18 April 1858, he visited the Villa Borghese, where he
saw a copy of The Faun of Praxiteles; Canova’s Pauline Borghese as Venus; and Bernini’s Æneas and Anchises,
David, and Apollo and Daphne: “In one of these upper rooms are some works of Bernini; two of them Æneas and
Anchises, and David on the point of slinging a stone at Goliath, have great merit, and do not tear and rend
themselves quite out of the laws and limits of marble, like his later sculptures. Here is also his Apollo, overtaking
Daphne, whose feet take root, whose finger-tips sprout into twigs, and whose tender body roughens roundabout with
bark, as he embraces her. It did not seem very wonderful to me; not so good as Hillard’s description of it made me
expect; and one does not enjoy these freaks in marble” (The French and Italian Notebooks 175).
47
doesn’t embody a “standstill,” what can and can’t be represented in marble—frame his ensuing
conversations with Miriam about the virtues of sculpting over painting.
Miriam realizes that this conversation is about aesthetics as much as it is about The Dying
Gladiator in particular, and she claims that by painting, she can represent both the “‘intervals
between two breaths’” and the broader gaps these intervals seem to represent (16). “‘I see,’”
Miriam tells Kenyon,
“You think that sculpture should be a sort of fossilizing process. But in truth,
your frozen art has nothing like the scope and freedom of Hilda’s and mine. In
painting, there is no similar objection to the representation of brief snatches of
time; perhaps because a story can be so much more fully told, in picture, and
buttressed about with circumstances that give it an epoch. For instance, a painter
never would have sent down yonder Faun out of his far antiquity, lonely and
desolate, with no companion to keep his simple heart warm.” (16–17).
Whereas Kenyon’s response to The Dying Gladiator is both a technical “criticism” and a
philosophy about what subjects are and aren’t appropriate for marble, Miriam’s description of
painting shows how she’s interested in art’s narrative potential. Although many consider this
book to be a meditation on sculpture, Miriam’s “criticism,” the first of many conversations with
Kenyon on the subject, shows how the plot dramatizes a series of subtler debates.
By pitting sculpture and painting against one another, Miriam not only suggests the
limitations of working in clay or in marble; she also poses deeper philosophical inquires about
what kinds of stories or histories can be expressed through art. According to Susan Williams,
“Miriam uses the word ‘epoch’ to suggest a theory of temporality: for her, as for Hilda,
paintings are not frozen in time but instead present ‘circumstances’ that invite observers to place
48
them in a story, a larger temporal continuum” (160–161). In fact, Miriam suggests that the
fixedness of marble makes present-tense subjects look like they belong to the past. Miriam
thinks Kenyon’s commitment to sculpture limits his understanding of temporality, since marble
often over-glorifies its subjects, stripping them of their humanness. Even more provocative than
her theory of temporality, though, are her ideas about interpretation and representation. Miriam
suggests that an appreciation of sculpture requires observers to conjure narrative contexts on
their own; she believes that painting must tell “a story,” something as subtle as the gladiator’s
final breath or as grand as “fossilizing” history (16, 17). For Miriam, a figure should not exist in
isolation (which is ironic, given how obscure she has made her own backstory, a situation to
which I will return later in this chapter). It needs a narrative context, for if there’s no story, then
there’s also no moral. Miriam seems almost to suggest that there is an inherent paradox in
Kenyon’s ideas about a “moral” “standstill” (16). Miriam prefers painting, because it can
represent humans thinking and feeling things that transcend discrete “intervals” of time, and
because people can only find meaning in figures within larger narrative contexts (16).40
Neither Miriam nor Kenyon embodies Hawthorne’s personal beliefs about whether art
should or shouldn’t be a historical document and whether sculpture precludes historicism. Still,
their ongoing conversations illuminate critical interest in Hawthorne’s allegiances to one kind of
fictional practice over another (that is, romance over realism or historical realism) as well as his
politicoaesthetic ambivalence. Ultimately, the conversation before The Dying Gladiator is about
40
Adolf Naumann and Will Ladislaw have a similar conversation before The Sleeping Ariadne in the Rome
chapters of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), which I discuss in chapter two. Instead of discussing the
limitations of sculpting or of painting alone, however, they also discuss the virtues of language. Ladislaw tells
Naumann “‘You would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background which every connoisseur would
give a different reason for or against. And what is a portrait of a woman? Your painting and Plastik are poor stuff
after all. They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising them. Language is a finer medium’” (179).
49
aesthetic limitations. It dramatizes a paragraph from Hawthorne’s French and Italian
Notebooks. On 18 March 1859, Hawthorne writes,
Looked at the Faun, at the Dying Gladiator, and what other famous sculptures are
to be seen there; but nothing had a glory round it, perhaps because a sirocco was
blowing. These sculpture halls of the Capitol have always had a dreary and
depressing effect on me, very different from those of the Vatican; I know not
why, except that the rooms of the former have a dingy, shabby, and neglected
look, and that the statues are dusty, and all the arrangements less magnificent than
the Vatican’s. The corroded and discolored surfaces of the statues take away
from the impression of immortal youth, and turn Apollo himself into an old stone;
unless at rare intervals, when he appears transfigured by a light gleaming from
within. (510–511)
Hawthorne realizes that this place is hopelessly “corroded,” and although “the Faun, the Dying
Gladiator,” and the rest of the Capitol are ultimately an inspiration for The Marble Faun, he
initially finds them to be merely “dusty” (510, 511).
The very next paragraph in Hawthorne’s Notebook appears, almost verbatim, as the
conversation between Kenyon and Miriam. The first half of the lengthy paragraph becomes
Kenyon’s “criticism”:
I used to admire the Dying Gladiator exceedingly; but, in my later views of him, I
find myself getting weary and annoyed that he should be such a length of time
leaning on his arm, in the very act of death. If he is so terribly hurt, why does he
not sink down and die, without further ado? Flitting moments—imminent
emergencies—imperceptible intervals between two breaths—ought not to be
50
encrusted with the eternal repose of marble; there should be a moral stand-still in
any sculptural subject, since there needs to be a physical one. It is like flinging a
piece of marble into the air, and, by some enchantment, or trick, making it stick
there; you feel as if it ought to come down, and are dissatisfied that it does not
obey the natural law. (511).
The second half becomes Miriam’s: “In painting, though it is equally motionless as sculpture,
there does not appear to be this objection to representing brief snatches of time; perhaps because
a story can be told more broadly in picture, and so the momentary circumstance can be
buttressed about with other things that give it an epoch” (511). Hawthorne made few changes
when he revised this passage from its nonfictional to its fictional form.
He added the “fossilizing” sentence to Miriam’s “criticism,” which clarifies the
differences she sees between sculpture and painting, but he also made two much more significant
revisions. Hawthorne was interested in tense when he revised the paragraph. In The Marble
Faun, he eliminates the adjective “momentary” from “momentary circumstances” (The French
and Italian Notebooks 511). It’s strange that he omits “momentary,” since this word highlights
the problem of temporality Kenyon and Miriam are discussing. The most important difference
between the nonfictional and the fictional versions is, however, the fact that this conversation
between two people originally appears as a monologue. That the single paragraph becomes a
dialogue between two artists (one with a taste for narrative context and one with a taste for
isolated figures during isolated moments) suggests that the problem of historicity became
increasingly divided in Hawthorne’s mind between 1859 and 1860. By parsing his own first
impressions into two distinct interpretations of The Dying Gladiator, Hawthorne’s prose
becomes more, not less, ambivalent over time. This ambivalence is two-fold. First, the revisions
51
between the first and the second versions suggest Hawthorne embraces, and even highlights, the
equivocation he first felt in situ. Far from downplaying the representational paradox he poses in
this entry, he stresses each side by dividing the words between Kenyon and Miriam. Second, the
revision in The Marble Faun shows how Hawthorne strayed further and further from The Dying
Gladiator and used this statue to theorize representational dilemmas much more generally.
In fact, the characters’ conversation about what can and can’t be represented parallels the
theory of fiction Hawthorne refines in the prefaces to his earlier romances. Hawthorne’s most
famous definition of “Romance” appears in the “Preface” to The House of Seven Gables, where
he suggests that this genre coyly blends fiction and nonfiction: “When a writer calls his work a
Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its
fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed
to be writing a Novel” (3). “The latter form of composition is presumed to aim at a very minute
fidelity,” Hawthorne continues, “not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary
course of man’s experience. The former—while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to
laws, and while it sins unpardonably, so far as it may serve aside from the truth of the human
heart—has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the
writer’s own choosing or creation” (3). Hawthorne’s comments about “latitude” illuminate The
Marble Faun as much as they do his work of the early 1850s, and his language in the first
chapter echoes his 1851 “Preface”: “Viewed through this medium, our narrative—into which are
woven some airy and unsubstantial threads, intermixed with others, twisted out of the
commonest stuff of human existence—may seem not widely different from the texture of all our
lives. Side by side with the massiveness of the Roman past, all matters, that we handle or dream
52
of, now-a-days, look evanescent and visionary alike” (The Marble Faun 6). By 1860,
Hawthorne’s definition of Romance imbues the story itself, not just the preface.
Hawthorne’s generic composite has bothered his readers since its original printing.
Critics interested in genre have noted that The Marble Faun reads like ciceroned mappings of
Rome, Florence, and the Tuscan countryside; and when we read Hawthorne’s chapters
discretely, it’s often hard to tell whether Hawthorne’s ekphrastic “moments” belong to a fictional
or a nonfictional text. Recent criticism has pointed to instances when The Marble Faun
fictionalizes passages from Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne’s personal travelogues.41 Many
scholars have argued that this romance is a failure, a project Hawthorne managed to finish, but
just barely to finish, and it appears only as a pastiche of real-life experiences. It’s important,
however, to work beyond this biocritical mythology, which emphasizes Hawthorne’s writerly
lassitude in order to explain how or why The Marble Faun isn’t as polished as the other three
romances. The Capitol clearly had “a dreary and depressing effect” on Hawthorne in real life;
but whatever his personal experience of ennui may have been, world-weariness is a narrative or a
metanarrative preoccupation, not a stylistic flaw (511). In fact, Hawthorne’s generic “latitude,”
which we see in his provocative revisions between the fictional and the nonfictional passages,
reminds us that this book resists narrative closure, privileging its meditation on temperament
over the exposition of plot (the telling of a linear story or a linear history).
The conversation about The Dying Gladiator is about what is or isn’t narratable, and also
about how artistic modes predetermine what is or isn’t narratable. The characters’ moody
interest in historiography connects their ideas about representation (how do sculptors and
painters represent time differently?) with Hawthorne’s own project (how is a Romance different
from a Novel?). Hawthorne’s Romance is, then, ambivalence writ large, a genre that replicates
41
For readings that address The Marble Faun as travelogue, see Brodhead, Bentley, Bell, and Manning.
53
the very ambivalence defining the conversation between Kenyon and Miriam. Indeed, The
Marble Faun abstracts the characters’ ambivalence about what sculpture can and can’t represent
on the level of its generic identity. For in combining private and public accounts of the same
impressions, the Romance itself realizes ambivalence.
The most famous Roman expatriates, including Fuller but also George Gordon, Lord
Byron and Anna Jameson, were already known for their self-conscious confusions of nonfiction
with fiction, private rhetoric with public rhetoric. Fuller’s dispatches to the New-York Daily
Tribune were written expressly for a public audience, but she often confesses her personal
opinions on politics and aesthetics, even as she guarded her private life. Byron’s Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818)42 and Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826)43 do just the
opposite: they are fictionalized travelogues masquerading as fact. Though Byron’s, Jameson’s,
Fuller’s, and Hawthorne’s texts are different in many crucial ways, each seems to require generic
flexibility in order to document Roman experiences and to bridge private and public exigencies:
“—O what a country is this!” writes Jameson, “All that I can see, I feel—all that I feel, sinks so
deep into my heart and my memory! the deeper because I suffer—and because I never think of
expressing, or sharing one emotion with those around me, but lock it up in my own bosom; or at
least in my little book—as I do now” (93). “There is very little that I can like to write about
Italy,” Fuller writes in May 1847; “Italy is beautiful, worthy to be loved and embraced, not
talked about. Yet I remember well that when afar I liked to read what was written about her;
now all thought of it is very tedious” (Dispatches from Europe 131). All of these texts are, then,
preoccupied with ineffability. Sometimes these writers are interested in transcending
42
I’ll return to Byron’s representation of The Dying Gladiator in Canto IV when I address the ways in which
expiring politics and aesthetics subtly overlap with one another.
43
Hawthorne and Jameson knew each other well, and he visited her often during his Roman residence. For
accounts of their visits with one another, see The French and Italian Notebooks.
54
ineffability, in putting words to the things they’re thinking and feeling. In these moments, they
often rely on tropes that clearly mark their experiences as public or as private, and that identify
the texts as fictional or as nonfictional. Sometimes, however, they wallow in ineffability, and
during these moments such boundaries are self-consciously vague (as in the cases of Jameson
and Fuller above). These broad-stroke patterns are all the more provocative since these four
writers were committed to Italy for very different reasons.
Collectively, however, they suggest that unnarratable “moments”—especially
unnarratable “moments” in Italy—require the kind of generic composite we find in The Marble
Faun. Hawthorne’s silence over present-tense Italy intimates a kind of moody historiography as
much as it is a sustained meditation on genre. For as early as the first chapter, the narrator
acknowledges that he wants to place “the reader into that state of feeling which is experienced
oftenest at Rome” (6). “It is a vague sense of ponderous remembrances,” Hawthorne continues,
“a perception of such weight and density in a by-gone life, of which this spot was the centre, that
the present moment is pressed down or crowded out, and our individual affairs and interests are
but half as real, here, as elsewhere” (6). Later, the narrator promises “not to meddle with
history—with which our narrative is not otherwise concerned, than that the very dust of Rome is
historic, and inevitably settles on our page, and mingles with our ink” (101). The narrator is,
then, self-conscious about his identity as historiographer. For as daunting as the past may be, the
present is even more elusive.
Hawthorne’s romance is, in fact, not just about tentativeness, a politicoaesthetic state of
thinking or feeling: the narrative actualizes this mood through its quiet treatment of midnineteenth-century Rome. In The Marble Faun, the Italian Risorgimento is the ultimate
unnarratable. Critics interested in the Risorgimento and the unnarratable tend to read Miriam as
55
the central figure. Indeed, Hawthorne often characterizes Miriam in terms of her mysterious
national identity. Kenyon, Hilda, Donatello, and even the narrator never learn where she is from,
but their suppositions are wide-ranging: Miriam is a Jew, a mulatta, or an expatriate who was, at
one time, involved in any one of the 1848 revolutions.44 While the other characters don’t know
who she was or where she was from, they do wonder about her connection to “the Model,” a
mysterious person she studies over and over again in her paintings. Donatello murders the
Model halfway through the story (see chapter XVIII, “On the Edge of a Precipice”) while
Miriam and, much more distantly, Hilda look on, a fact that haunts the two women until the end
of the book. Many critics have suggested that Miriam is as guilty as Donatello for the Model’s
death, because it’s clear she fears he knows something about her past connections (perhaps to the
1848 revolutions) as early as chapter I.45
Though many read The Marble Faun as an anomaly within Hawthorne’s canon, we can
trace parallels between Hester’s guilt in The Scarlet Letter and Miriam’s guilt in The Marble
44
For readings of Miriam’s mysterious background, especially her national or transnational identity, see Meyers,
Dunne, Kolich, Wineapple, and Rowe. Critics have suggested many possible historical sources for Miriam’s
character, including Margaret Fuller, Maria Louisa Landor, Emma Salomons, Beatrice Cenci, as well as figures
involved in the Mortara kidnapping. For arguments about historical sources, see Wineapple, Rowe, and Milder. For
a discussion that places Miriam in a lineage ranging from Staël’s Corinne to Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, see
Siegel.
45
The most obvious evidence of Miriam’s and Hilda’s lingering guilt may be the bust Kenyon sculpts of Donatello
in chapter XXX: “By some accidental handling of the clay, entirely independent of his own will, Kenyon had given
the countenance a distorted and violent look, combining animal fierceness with intelligent hatred. Had Hilda, or had
Miriam, seen the bust, with the expression which it had now assumed, they might have recognized Donatello’s face
as they beheld it at that terrible moment, when he held his victim over the precipice” (272). Tellingly, then Miriam
and Hilda see the murder, but not the bust. Even though Kenyon doesn’t know Donatello murdered the model, the
narrator’s description of his bust suggests that he intuits his subject’s anxiousness and that this anxiousness may be
the reason he wants to memorialize Donatello’s expression in the first place: “The work had now made considerable
progress, and necessarily kept the sculptor’s thoughts brooding much and often upon his host’s personal
characteristics. These it was his difficult office to bring out from their depths, and interpret them to all men,
showing them what they could not discern for themselves, yet must be compelled to recognize at a glance, on the
surface of a block of marble” (270). From the narrator’s perspective, Kenyon “was chiefly perplexed how to make
this genial and kindly type of countenance the index of the mind within. His acuteness and his sympathies, indeed,
were both somewhat at fault in their efforts to enlighten him as to the moral phase through which the Count was now
passing. If, at one sitting, he caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a genuine and permanent trait, it would
probably be less perceptible, on a second occasion, and perhaps have vanished entirely, at a third. So evanescent
show of character threw the sculptor into despair; not marble or clay, but cloud and vapour, was the material in
which it ought to be represented. Even the ponderous depression, which constantly weighed upon Donatello’s heart
could not compel him into the kind of repose which the plastic art requires” (270–271).
56
Faun, for both women’s “crimes” are connected to their sense of revolutionary displacement.
Miriam’s involvement, or possible involvement, in the mid-nineteenth-century revolutions is
defined, then, by her unnarratable complicity in her unspeakable past. Robert Milder and
Antoine Traisnel have argued that the narrative internalizes her guilt: the physical falls, the
metaphysical falls, and the caesuras throughout the plot variously dramatize the tight-lipped
connections that define Miriam’s relationships with the other characters. When Hawthorne
scholars address the unnarratable and the Risorgimento with respect to Miriam, they often read
The Marble Faun as crime fiction.46 In these readings, Hawthorne’s ambivalence exists in the
tension between Miriam’s confessions and nonconfessions. Yet Miriam’s connections to the
unnarratable and the Risorgimento transcend her “crimes.” By emphasizing Miriam’s identity as
a painter, which clearly inflects the way she perceives her world, we will be better able to
understand Hawthorne’s muted treatment of Rome between 1858 and 1859.
Unlike Kenyon, Miriam is committed to painting since it renders crises, or the
anticipation of crises, in temporal perspective. Miriam’s sensitivity to the exigencies of midnineteenth-century Italy may be biographical; however, the narrator also suggests that this
fixation on the present is the defining principle of her painterly philosophy. According to Rita
Gollin and John Idol, who catalogue the sculpture discussed in The French and Italian
Notebooks and in The Marble Faun, “Hawthorne dramatized tentativeness and relativity in
aesthetic response” through his “protagonists” (123). Indeed, while studying The Faun of
Praxiteles, Miriam coyly acknowledges her sullied past. “‘Ah,’” Miriam whispers to Kenyon,
“‘if Hilda, and you, and I—if I, at least—had pointed ears! For I suppose the Faun had no
conscience, no remorse, no burthen on the heart, no troublesome recollections of any sort; no
46
For readings that emphasize Miriam’s crime, Miriam’s guilt, or her involvement in the Risorgimento, see Meyers,
Goldman, Levine, Kolich, Manning, Leverenz, Rowe, and Hughes. For readings that interpret Miriam as a
nineteenth-century Beatrice Cenci, see Meyers, Gollin and Idol, Wineapple, Bell, and Rowe.
57
dark future neither!’” (The Marble Faun 13–14). Miriam continues her nonconfessional
confession just moments before seeing The Dying Gladiator. “‘I should be content, then,’”
Miriam says, “‘if I could only forget one day of all my life.’—Then she seemed to repent of this
allusion” (15). When Miriam and Kenyon discuss The Dying Gladiator, she reveals her concern
that this statue secrets history. Miriam’s “conscience” seems, then, to affect her interpretation of
The Dying Gladiator, and it shows how her “criticism” about the statue’s temporality necessarily
puts aesthetics and politics in conversation with one another.
Just as the narrative poses contexts for Miriam’s uncertain past, Hawthorne’s readership
would have recognized The Dying Gladiator through its cultural associations, which drastically
altered the statue’s meaning between the French Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento.
Miriam’s interest in the gladiator’s “epoch” belongs to a long cultural history that dates to the
French Revolution and connects her to travellers as various as Felicia Hemans, Byron, and
Jameson.47 Kenyon’s idea that this figure embodies “—imminent emergencies—imperceptible
intervals between two breaths” conveys the urgency of the 1850s as well as the 1790s, when
scholars first popularized the idea that the Gladiator was a Gaul. Even as late as 1859, when
Hawthorne first saw The Dying Gladiator, people were still questioning the context for the
statue: who is he? where is he from? These unknowns may be part of what horrifies Miriam,
who seems to identify with its mysterious origins. In fact, nineteenth-century antiquarians
wondered whether The Dying Gladiator was Greek or whether it was a Roman copy of a Greek
47
For poetic renderings of The Dying Gladiator, see Hemans’s “The Statue of the Dying Gladiator” (1812) and
Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto IV, stanzas 140–142 (1818). Interestingly, Bryon narrates the story
behind the statue over three stanzas; like Kenyon and like Miriam, then, he realizes that this moment separates the
“intervals between two breaths,” the instance when a body exists at the cusp of living and not living. Yet while the
Byronic poet dies for his politicoaesthetic principles, the mid-nineteenth-century sculptor or painter seems mired by
uneasy ambivalence, unable either to represent or to bypass the moment.
58
original; they also questioned whether the single figure once belonged to part of a larger tableau
(Fraser 418; Marvin 407).48
The Dying Gladiator seems to have been a touchstone throughout the nineteenth century.
For if visitors to the Capitol could read ancient Rome in Risorgimento Italy, or Risorgimento
Italy in ancient Rome, then they might be able to reckon the consequences of past-tense wars on
the present or the future. Though Hawthorne refers to the statue as a Gladiator, he gestures
toward the historical alliances between the Gauls and the French throughout The Marble Faun.
The debate over the statue’s provenance, and whether it’s right to title it a Gladiator or a Gaul
suggests people’s desire to project contemporary international politics on the age-old statue.
Like the French soldati, whom the narrator lingers over throughout The Marble Faun, The Dying
Gladiator is a ghost haunting the Eternal City. Arnold Goldman notes, “Napoleon III’s soldiers
who reinstated Pius IX in Rome are ubiquitous in The Marble Faun. […] The French are not
only present in the flesh, but also in the minds of the characters. […] Indeed today’s French are
seen as an extension of the Gauls of history” (399–400). Regardless of whether the statue is or
isn’t a “Gaul,” it’s telling that this figure is the parable through which Hawthorne introduces his
characters’ ideas about the historicity of art.
Hawthorne, like his Romantic predecessors, probably would have known that this figure
had been carved and re-carved across the centuries. While copies of the statue were made long
after the fall of Greece and Rome, early statues were often changeable: sculptors chiseled away
at the marble over hundreds or thousands of years, updating the figures’ features to match current
invaders (or stereotypes of current invaders) (Marvin 408). Even the most casual tourists seemed
to have taken an interest in the sculpture, or partial sculpture, and their curiosities about its
48
It’s interesting that this figure may have been one of many within a larger narrative piece. Kenyon and Miriam
don’t address the missing pieces since they read The Dying Gladiator in isolation; however, their respective interests
in the figure’s posture are predicated on his awkward singularity.
59
prophetic history are reflected in travelogues of the period. In fact, as early as the 1820s, people
had imagined the Gladiator as a Gaul by associating specific features (his hair, his moustache,
and his clothing) with stereotypes of Northern “barbarians.”49 Indeed, the standard name for the
statue changed from The Dying Gladiator to The Dying Gaul after 1800 (with Ennio Quirino
Visconti’s publication of the Catalogue des bijoux du Musée Napoléon III), a disambiguation
that has since been challenged by people interested in the provenance of the statue as well as the
racial stereotypes associated with its story (“Gaul” seems to have implied “barbarian” as often as
it implied French antecedents or Northern people much more generally) (Marvin 407).
Still, during this volatile period, the interpretation of The Dying Gladiator as A Dying
Gaul would have been highly charged; and that interpretation remains unspoken within the text
of The Marble Faun. Indeed, references to the Italian Risorgimento both are and aren’t present
in this scene. Though none of the characters demonstrates an explicit interest in the revolution,
Hawthorne’s narrator reminds us that Rome was controlled by the French in 1859. Early in the
story, the narrator claims that Italians should remember “only a few years ago,” when “they
were grievously imperiled by the Gaul’s last assault upon the walls of Rome. As if confident in
49
Jameson’s ennuyée is absorbed with minutiae rendering the Gladiator a Gaul, suggesting that this debate was
well-known as early as 1826: “The dying Gladiator is the chief boast of the Capitol. The antiquarian Nibby insists
that this statue represents a Gaul, that the sculpture is Grecian, that it formed part of a group on a pediment,
representing the vengeance which Apollo took on the Gauls, when under their king Brennus, they attacked the
temple of Delphi: that the cord round the neck is a twisted chain, an ornament peculiar to the Gauls; and that the
form of the shield, the bugles, the style of the hair, and the mustachios, all prove it to be a Gaul. I asked, ‘why
should such faultless, such exquisite sculpture be thrown away upon a high pediment? the affecting expression of
the countenance, the head ‘bowed low and full of death,’ the gradual failure of the strength and sinking of the form,
the blood slowly trickling from his side—how could any spectator, contemplating it at a vast height, be sensible of
these minute traits—the distinguishing perfections of this matchless statue? it was replied, that many of the ancient
buildings were so constructed, that it was possible to ascend and examine the sculpture above the cornice and though
some statues so placed, were unfinished at the back (for instance, some of the figures which belonged to the group
of Niobe) others, (and he mentioned the Ægina marbles as an example) were as highly finished behind as before. I
owned myself unwilling to consider the Gladiator, a Gaul, but the reasoning struck me, and I am too unlearned to
weigh the arguments he used, much less confute them. That the statue being of Grecian marble and Grecian
sculpture must therefore have come from Greece, does not appear a conclusive argument, since the Romans
commonly employed Greek artists: and as to the rest of the argument,—suppose that in a dozen centuries hence, the
charming statue of Lady Louisa Russel should be discovered under the ruins of Woburn Abbey, and that by a parity
of reasoning, the production of Chantrey’s chisel should be attributed to Italy and Canova, merely because it is cut
from a block of Carrara marble? we might smile at such a conclusion” (148–149).
60
the long peace of their lifetime, they assumed attitudes of indolent repose” (The Marble Faun
71). Hawthorne’s romance, like many fictional and nonfictional travelogues, seems selfconscious about the politicized lineage connecting the French to the Gauls, and his persistent
interest in the French is telling, especially given the moniker he applies to their present
occupation: it is “the Gaul’s last assault” (71). Across the rest of the book, the narrator at once
hedges and lingers over the French soldati who occupied Rome between 1848 and 1859. The
Dying Gladiator, then, appears as a figure who embodies the tentative state of Franco-Italian
relations during the Risorgimento, and his centrality in the first and the second chapters
introduces Hawthorne’s subtle meditation on present-tense history. It sets the mood for the rest
of the romance, anticipating its thematic strains: moody repose, physical and metaphysical falls,
and historiographic dilemmas.
The French soldati are ever-present in The Marble Faun, and while many critics have
addressed this in passing, few read it as much more than Hawthorne’s tacit acknowledgement
that Rome was, in fact, under foreign occupation.50 Yet these soldiers embody the subtleties of
Franco-Italian tensions, and the narrator’s persistent interest in them belies what seems, at first,
to be fleeting glimpses. Indeed, the narrator returns to them again and again, often opening
chapters with descriptions of the “red-trowsered” figures. These soldati punctuate a Roman
panorama otherwise largely devoid, from the narrator’s perspective, of day-to-day life. In her
50
Goldman, Brodhead, Levine, Manning, and Rowe are among the critics who address the French soldati. Rowe
shows how Hawthorne’s time in Paris likely influenced his depiction of the soldati who occupied Rome: Hawthorne
“takes comfort and even finds a certain charm in the French troops occupying Rome (XIV 63–64), whom he
sometimes criticizes for excessive military exercises ‘to keep the imperial city in awe’ (XIV 144), but generally
praises as ‘young, fresh, good-looking men, in excellent trim as to uniform and equipments’ and concludes ‘I was
not sorry to see the Gauls still pouring into Rome’ (XIV 232). Hawthorne makes most of these favorable
observations about the French military in 1858, when Italian republicans still considered the French their bitter
enemies and colonial occupiers of their homeland. However oblivious Hawthorne appears to be about these
admittedly confusing political events in 1858–1860, he was certainly aware of the deep enmity of Italian nationalists
toward the French between 1848 and 1859. Hawthorne and his family had been touring Marseilles in January 1858
when the news arrived from Paris that ‘Felice Orsini and three other Italian revolutionary conspirators had hurled
powerful bombs at the imperial carriage as Napoleon [III] and the empress arrived at the Opéra’” (Rowe 98–99).
61
pithy reading of The Marble Faun, Brenda Wineapple discusses one moment when Hawthorne’s
soldati enter the Roman landscape, which Hawthorne compares to “a long decaying corpse”
(Hawthorne, The Marble Faun 325). Wineapple argues that this corpse is emblematic of the rest
of the romance, and she suggests we read the Italy-as-corpse as an effigy. “The past is never
dead,” Wineapple contends, “In Rome the physical evidence of the past is written into every
paving stone, making it for Hawthorne a fitting emblem of romance. And Italy itself exists as
much in the imagination as in the real world” (320). Italy appears, near the end of The Marble
Faun as an embodiment, a “rotting” embodiment, heralding “the death of romance” (320). For
Wineapple, then, the corpse elegizes the theoretical project Hawthorne seems to have had in
mind in 1859.
Wineapple argues that this conceit is a gory culmination among the narrator’s other
nostalgic abstractions; however, the narrator’s remembrance is equally haunted by the present.
“When we have once known Rome,” Hawthorne writes, “and left her where she lies, like a long
decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a
fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features” (325). The subject of the
paragraph-long sentence is a plural first person, a collective consciousness of all the tourists who
have traveled to Rome. Hawthorne’s narrator refers to Italy with feminine pronouns, and he
catalogues the deadened things these tourists likely saw, separating the sights into ten
independent clauses. The paragraph winds in and out of the familiar Roman landscape, and the
anaphoric “—let her” (before each of the ten independent clauses) maps their scripted tour of the
Eternal City. Halfway through his catalogue, the narrator includes “regiments of cavalry”
alongside “a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadours, and an upper tier of artists,
62
just beneath the unattainable sky” (325).51 Amidst the ethereal panorama, the “regiments of
cavalry” are striking, reminding us that this place was a warzone crowded with French soldiers
and with real dead bodies (325). For if Wineapple suggests that this corpse-like Italy is just
metaphor or extended metaphor, then the regiments’ casual place within the Roman setting
substantiates the French and the Italian people who otherwise seem to be missing from The
Marble Faun.
Hawthorne’s narrator identifies the French soldati as “red-trowsered” inheritors of the
Gauls throughout The Marble Faun. While at least one of these references is cavalier (the
moment when he terms the French occupation “the Gaul’s last assault”), most of his associations
are subtler. For instance, when the narrator glosses Roman history, he mentions “Gaul” (as well
as Great Britain, and, vaguely, “beyond the sea”) among the barbarian countries who usurped the
Eternal City both (tellingly) as mid-century soldiers and as mid-century tourists: “The Pincian
Hill is the favourite promenade of the Roman aristocracy. At the present day, however, like
most other Roman possessions, it belongs less to the native inhabitants than to the barbarians
from Gaul, Great Britain, and beyond the sea, who have established a peaceful usurpation over
whatever is enjoyable or memorable in the Eternal City” (99).52 Just as the narrator distracts our
attention from The Faun of Praxiteles and The Dying Gladiator to a vague remembrance of the
past in the opening chapters, he redirects our gaze, here, to present-tense Frenchmen.
Far from being “barbarians,” the French soldati appear to be benign:
In this pleasant spot, the red-trowsered French soldiers are always to be seen;
bearded and grizzled veterans, perhaps, with medals of Algiers or the Crimea on
51
Hawthorne’s catalogue echoes the one we see in the first part of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi
Windows (1851), which I discuss in chapter three.
52
There’s a similar passage in James’s Roderick Hudson: “Rome for the past month had been delicious. The
annual descent of the Goths had not yet begun, and sunny leisure seemed to brood over the city” (108).
63
their breasts. To them is assigned the peaceful duty of seeing that children do not
trample on the flower-beds, nor any youthful lover rifle them of their fragrant
blossoms to stick in the beloved one’s hair. Here sits (drooping upon some
marble bench, in the treacherous sunshine) the consumptive girl, whose friends
have brought her, for cure, to a climate that instills poison into its very purest
breath. Here, all day long, come nursery-maids, burthened with rosy English
babies, or guiding the footsteps of little travellers from the far Western world.
Here, in the sunny afternoons, roll and rumble all kinds of equipages, from the
cardinal’s old-fashioned and gorgeous purple carriage, to the gay barouche of
modern date. Here horsemen gallop, on thorough-bred steeds. Here, in short, all
the transitory population of Rome, the world’s great watering-place, rides, drives,
or promenades; here are beautiful sunsets; and here, whichever way you turn your
eyes, are scenes as well worth gazing at, both in themselves and for their historic
interest, as any that the sun ever rose and set upon. Here, too, on certain
afternoons of the week, a French military band flings out rich music over the poor
old city, floating her with strains as loud as those of her own echoless triumphs.
(100–101)
The narrator lingers over the French soldati, whose presence within the streets and the gardens
appears surprisingly paternal. Hawthorne’s language suggests that this familiarity between
French and Italian people was, in fact, commonplace, and the domestic figures seem complacent
about the military occupation. It’s interesting that this is Hawthorne’s most sustained allusion to
day-to-day life during the Risorgimento period. For if Rome was a cosmopolitan warzone, then
the narrator’s depiction shows how French occupation was no longer unnerving by 1859, at least
64
from an expatriate point of view. Yet even though the narrator portrays the French soldati as
dated “veterans,” whose occupation appears to be superfluous (their medals from Algiers and the
Crimea suggest that this assignment to Rome would have been plum), his description insists on
immediacy. The repetition of “Here . . . ” “Here . . . ” “Here . . . ” throughout the passage defies
movement in much the same way as The Dying Gladiator, echoing the sense of anticipation
these people likely felt.
While the Italy-as-corpse passage associates the French soldati with a deadened past, the
staccato pace of “Here . . .” “Here . . . ” “Here . . . ” quickens Rome with an urgency Susan
Manning terms Impressionistic: “Hawthorne seems to have been grasping at something
approaching a verbal analogue of painterly Impressionism (whose initial manifestations, though
we have no evidence that he was aware of them, were beginning to emerge in France at just this
time)” (xxxvii). For Manning, Hawthorne’s Impressionism renders “the emptiness of surfaces”
crowded, allowing him “to focus on the relationship between the engagement of the eye and the
interpretations of the mind” (xxxvii). Though Manning doesn’t associate Hawthorne’s
Impressionism with the French soldati, her argument about Hawthorne’s “painterly” style
situates The Marble Faun within avant-garde movements of the mid-nineteenth century, further
contextualizing Kenyon’s and Miriam’s respective interests in problematic representation.
Manning reads Hawthorne through Pierre Bourdieu’s “‘pure gaze,’” “in which the object is
separated from its original contexts of meaning and setting (as, for example, when we view a
church fresco as an object not of religious instruction but of aesthetic appreciation)” (xxxii).
Bourdieu argues that this kind of dehistoricized appreciation gave rise to Impressionistic ways of
thinking, feeling, and seeing the modern world; Manning shows how painters, including Édouard
Manet, popularized the theory of pure gaze “in 1860s France” (xxxii). “This date would place
65
The Marble Faun on the cusp of a new understanding of aesthetic experience,” Manning
contends, and it “and provides a suggestive context in which to consider Hawthorne’s ambivalent
dramatization of the desire to ‘possess’ the significance of works from whose meanings the
modern observer seems necessarily excluded” (xxxii). Just as the conversation about The Dying
Gladiator shows how Miriam’s “painterly” worldview interrogates sculpture, especially the
temporal limitations of sculpture, Hawthorne’s “Impressionistic” soldati represent the
politicoaesthetic landscape of mid-nineteenth-century Rome. Their “red-trowsered” bodies may
be fleeting in Hawthorne’s romance, but it’s precisely this fleetingness that makes the “imminent
emergencies” seem real. Hawthorne’s sense of historical realism lies, then, in its fleeting or its
fractured quality, not in a sharp delineation we might otherwise expect.
Hawthorne’s soldati, in fact, resemble portraits of French and Italian soldiers made by the
Macchiaioli, politically-minded Italian painters who conveyed the tentative mood of the 1850s
and the 1860s through their proto-“Impressionistic” brushstrokes.53 During the 1850s and the
1860s, this group of Italian painters (Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and Telemaco Signorini
are among the leading figures) became known for their “rich layering” of “social topography,”
and by the end of the century, their work was recognized as quintessential renderings of the
Risorgimento (Boime, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle 365). In the wake of realized Unification,
they were known as the face of Italian art, especially patriotic Italian art, though they were, at
first, considered provincial “outlaws” (367). According to Albert Boime, a leading historian of
nineteenth-century Italian art, the Macchiaioli “were for the most part democratic intellectuals
and activists who organized as a group in Florence in the late 1850s and attained their collective
apogee in the following decade, a period coinciding with the establishment of a unified
53
See Albert Boime’s The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento and Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848–
1871, especially chapter five, “The Macchia and the Risorgimento.”
66
constitutional kingdom in Italy” (365). By the 1860s, their portraits of French and Italian
soldiers, and their landscapes, were understood as arguments for viewing Italy as “a national
space” (365). The Macchiaioli (the painters themselves) earned their name for their pointillist
technique. The word Macchiaioli comes from the Italian words macchia and aiolo. Boime notes
that macchia translates variously as spot, stain, or patch, and it also connotes “a motif,” “a
rhythm,” “or a psychic motion”; aioli is the suffix “attached to drudge labor” (Art in an Age of
Civil Struggle 367; The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento 13). While the Italian
Macchiaioli are often paired with schools of French Impressionism, or literary Impressionism,
that emerged just a decade later, Boime argues that this association is highly fraught, and he
traces the difficult reception these painters had, even within French avant-garde circles.54
Indeed, proto-Impressionism and Impressionism are still considered French traditions among
most art historians. Scholars of the Macchiaioli note that this group of painters shouldn’t be
classified as predecessors to the Impressionists, precisely because of the mid-nineteenth-century
global politics that were so often the subject of Macchiaioli paintings.
The Macchiaioli’s portraits and landscapes are a useful reference point for Hawthorne’s
soldati-filled panoramas, for they represent on canvas the tentativeness of Hawthorne’s Gauls,
both flesh and stone. The French soldati became iconic figures for the Macchiaioli, who often
rendered their bodies almost impressionistically, in vibrant reds against the much more muted
browns and greys that constitute the Tuscan landscape. In some paintings, the soldiers are the
sharp focal point, the only human beings in a symbolically barren landscape. In some paintings,
though, they are Hawthornesque: vaguely omnipresent but receding into a background crowded
with French, Italian, and Austrian figures. Boime notes that Giovanni Fattori’s treatment of
54
For a fuller history of the relationship between the Italian Macchiaioli and the French Impressionists, see the
Introduction to The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento
67
soldiers, especially French soldiers, became the movement’s iconic social criticism during the
1860s and the 1870s, and that he was the only one of the Macchiaioli “who continued to paint
military subjects after unification” (The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento 129). By 1859,
“Fattori developed a characteristic viewpoint of military personnel,” Boime writes, “often
depicting them from the rear on horseback or standing guard, or against neutral backdrops whose
bright reflections and contrasting ground emphasize the isolation and tension of military life”
(129). “Military life is neither romanticized nor glorified” in his portraits and his landscapes,
since “Fattori reveals its tedium, its loneliness, its wastefulness, its dreadful anticipation” (Boime
129). Like Hawthorne’s French soldiers, Fattori’s French soldiers are the subject of a repeated
meditation on the expectancies attending mid-nineteenth-century revolutions.
While Hawthorne’s personal investment in the Risorgimento may have been much more
conservative than Fattori’s, both define this moment by a cosmopolitan ambivalence fixed within
Rome, Florence, and the Tuscan countryside. One of Fattori’s most famous paintings, French
Soldiers of ’59, “is a fundamental study that declares [his] new direction and speaks for the
outlook of his colleagues” (129). The painting depicts one officer with eight soldiers. The
officer, who is standing apart and looking away from the soldiers, is the only figure with even
vague facial features. All but one of the troops are turned toward the grey sky in the background,
and the lone forward-facing soldier has a blank, burnt-umber countenance. While the soldiers
are loosely grouped off into four pairs, they seem to be resting: their formation becomes looser
and looser from the right- to the left-hand sides of the canvas. The would-be vertical lines of
their bodies seem disordered against the sharp horizontal line separating the light grey ground
from the dark grey sky. Ultimately, this sharp cross-section between the horizon and the men’s
68
bodies draws the eye to a hollowness in the center of the painting, suggesting the
meaninglessness of their occupation.
Boime argues that this painting is a critique of French (and perhaps Italian) resolution:
“The strangely silhouetted troops staggered in pairs are frozen into immobility by the contrasting
background, somewhat reminiscent of popular newspaper illustrations of troops in review in vast
open terrain. Fattori’s soldiers, however, seem to hover in midair, and despite the cast shadows
they lack fixity of position and project irresolution and uncertainty” (129–131). For Boime, the
officer’s body is the most damning part of Fattori’s critique, since he allegorizes the chaos
defining Risorgimento occupation. The officer “is twisted in expectancy and seems as confused
as the infantryman,” Boime writes, and the troops are equally “ambiguous and tentative” (131).
Still, Boime stresses that this painting does not belong to proto-Impressionist or Impressionist
schools. Indeed, as Boime argues, “without a consideration of Risorgimento politics it makes
little sense” (129). Fattori’s “painterly” urgency differs, then, from the French movements since
his sense of immediacy is grounded in the Italian politics and the Italian aesthetics shared among
his ideological circle. Hawthorne’s seemingly cavalier representation of the French soldati is
equally politicized: though they may not be as unflattering as Fattori’s much more overt
criticism, they are defined by the same idleness.
Two other chapters in The Marble Faun begin with descriptions of idle soldati. Chapter
six begins: “The neighborhood comprised a baker’s oven, emitting the usual fragrance of sour
bread; a shoe-shop; a linen-draper’s shop; a pipe and cigar-shop; a lottery office; a station for
French soldiers, with a sentinel pacing in front; and a fruit-stand, at which a Roman matron was
selling the dried kernels of chestnuts, wretched little figs, and some bouquets of yesterday” (51).
Chapter sixteen begins similarly: “A cobbler was just shutting up his little shop, in the basement
69
of the palace; a cigar-vender’s lantern flared in the blast that came through the archway; a French
sentinel paced to-and-fro before the portal; a homeless dog, that haunted thereabouts, barked as
obstreperously at the party as if he were the domestic guardian of the precincts” (142). The
Macchiaioli critique the French soldati precisely for this leisure, and their paintings suggest that
the French (and, by extension, the Austrian) militaries treated their Italian occupation coolly.
The French soldiers who populate Hawthorne’s romance have a Fattori-like quality: they are
Macchiaioli-esque. Though they are not the narrative focus, they suggest the cosmopolitan
spectacle governing Rome during the 1850s and the 1860s, even as they establish the looming
tone often defining these chapters. In fact, between May and June 1859, when Hawthorne was
finishing The Marble Faun, “French engineers” in Florence “even went so far as to erect a
showy temple in front of the camp, ornamented with a variety of military trophies and guarded
by the colossal busts of Napoleon III and Vittorio Emanuele II. Like the town itself, the park
was draped through its length and breadth with the tricolored flags of the allied forces” (Boime,
The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento 127). Soon thereafter, “the spectacle of the French
troops in the park degenerated into a form of public entertainment” and the otherwise “invincible
military machine began to expose its soft underbelly, opening itself to question and challenge”
(127).
Ultimately, in Fattori’s Florence and in Hawthorne’s Rome, the French soldati seem to
have lost their undivided authority within Italian cultural consciousnesses. For these spectacles
put them in intimate contact with the very people they were to contain: “Crowds and carriages
began circulating through the rows of tents which now provided a theatrical backdrop for the
groups of idle soldiers chopping down park trees, cooking, eating, shaving, and dressing.
Refreshments were sold by street vendors, and citizens and soldiers danced together to the tunes
70
of the military band” (127). Throughout The Marble Faun, the French soldati populate these
domestic scenes, protecting the homes and gardens and becoming paternal figures for children
we never see. Furthermore, they naturalize French invasion in Rome: by blending into day-today Italian life, they also blend into our political consciousness.
Likewise, Fuller’s dispatches contend that this spectacle was objectionable, and they are
punctuated with updates about the soldati as early as 1847 during the First War of Italian
Independence. For if Hawthorne associates the soldati with day-to-day idleness, Fuller accuses
Anglo-American artists and writers of the same, dubbing them “the dilettanti” (Dispatches from
Europe 132). Writing from Rome in May 1847, she directly compares the soldati to her worldweary compatriots:
Yet I find that it is quite out of the question to know Italy; to say anything of her
that is full and sweet, so as to convey any idea of her spirit, without long
residence, and residence in the districts untouched by the scorch and dust of
foreign invasion, (the invasion of the dilettanti I mean,) and without an intimacy
of feeling, an abandonment to the spirit of the place, impossible to most
Americans; they retain too much of their English blood; and the traveling English,
as a tribe, seem to me the most unseeing of all possible animals. (132)55
For Fuller, both the soldati and the dilettanti (who later populate Hawthorne’s romance)
overwhelm Rome with ennui. Fuller’s parenthetical, “(the invasion of the dilettanti I mean,)”
purports to be a clarifying appositive; however, it’s actually a crucial distinction. Fuller
obviously recognizes that the soldati and the dilettanti hold vastly different cultural meanings
(just as Hawthorne’s “barbarians” do), and shouldn’t be confused. Without the clarifying
appositive, Fuller’s criticism would be a censure of Austrian or of French politics. Instead, this
55
See dispatch no. 14, published on the front page of the 31 July 1847 edition of the New-York Daily Tribune.
71
provocative comparison reveals that Anglo-American artists and writers are, to Fuller’s mind, as
culpable as European governments. Just as Fuller’s letter to Channing (which I discussed in the
introduction and which was also written in May 1847) shows how she pits an appreciation of
aesthetics against contemporary Rome, the dilettanti dispatch shows how the two became
inextricably bound in her mind. Still, in the next paragraph, Fuller resigns herself to the
nineteenth-sculpture she still loves: “Yet I was again reconciled with them, the other day, in
visiting the studio of [Lawrence] Macdonald” (132). Both Fuller’s private and public
correspondences, then, reveal her worry that her allegiances to the artists and the writers might
betray her allegiances the Risorgimento, and that she could not devote herself wholeheartedly to
aesthetics and to politics at the same time.
Her distaste for the dilettanti may be grounded in American Pragmatist traditions,
especially given her personal connections to the philosophical lineage we trace, now, from
Emerson to Hawthorne and, later, to William and Henry James. For if Fuller subscribed to
Emersonian ideals, then it’s not surprising that she found this expatriate lassitude to be not only
unpatriotic and unsympathetic, but also morally suspect.56 Indeed, Fuller was often frustrated
with the Anglo-American dilettanti because they were rarely involved in Risorgimento politics.
These figures devoted themselves to their art or to the moody lassitude that often seemed
necessary for them to produce this work. The May 1847 dispatch shows how Fuller saw
parallels between the ennui expressed by artists and writers and the ennui often associated with
the protracted Risorgimento: if these artists and writers devoted themselves to something
besides their painting, their sculpting, or their writing, then the Italian people might realize
independence and unification sooner.
56
Emerson’s landmark essay “Experience,” included in the 1844 Second Series may be the most famous
articulation of his pragmatic or proto-pragmatic philosophies: “To fill the hour—that is happiness, to fill the hour
and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval” (314).
72
By focusing attention on “the spirit of the place,” the sensibility that drew together the
aesthetics and the politics of lassitude, Fuller chronicles Italy as a locus of mid-nineteenthcentury world-weariness. Yet from Fuller’s perspective, expatriate lassitude in Rome is as
censurable as the European Continent’s century-long “invasion” (132). Whether it’s the
Austrian or the French military or the Anglo-American aesthetes, the cosmopolitan populace
disfigures the Italian “landscape” (132). Though Fuller herself lived in Rome and in Florence
temporarily, she criticized Anglo-American expatriates’ vision of the city as a respite from
home. Across the dispatches, she often disparages her compatriot artists and writers for their
polticoaesthetic apathy, which would have been especially pointed, given her ongoing
complaints about French indolence.
Fuller contrasts the cosmopolitan soldati she regularly castigates with updates about the
Italian civic guard (both in Rome and in Florence), and she often describes her artist and her
writer friends’ involvement, or non-involvement, in the counter-regiments.57 Between 1847 and
1850, some Anglo-American expatriates served in the Italian civic guard. While Fuller’s
dispatches reveal her belief that Americans should support the Risorgimento, she was especially
moved by expatriate Americans who joined the civic guard, because their service marked not
only their patriotic and sympathetic alliances with Italians, but also the philosophies underlying
their work.
In a dispatch written on 18 October 1847, Fuller describes how impressed she was when
she learned Thomas Crawford, her sculptor-friend, had joined the Roman civic guard.
“Crawford here in Rome has had the just feeling to join the guard, and it is a real sacrifice for an
artist to spend time on the exercises,” Fuller writes, “but it well becomes the sculptor of Orpheus,
57
See dispatch no. 30, published 5 June 1849 and no. 34, published 11 August 1849 for accounts of the French
soldati.
73
of him who had such faith, such music of divine thought, that he made the stones move, turned
the beasts from their accustomed haunts and shamed Hell itself into sympathy with the grief of
love” (159).58 Just as Kenyon and Miriam debate the permanence or the impermanence inherent
in sculpture, Fuller is sensitive to Crawford’s politicoaesthetic motivations: “I do not deny that
such a spirit is wanted here in Italy; it is everywhere if anything great, anything permanent, is to
be done” (159). The metaphor Fuller uses to describe political action, “that he made the stones
move,” also anticipates the conversation Kenyon and Miriam have about The Dying Gladiator.
While Fuller doesn’t describe Crawford’s art in this dispatch, her language suggests that she
valorizes him for his sensitivity to what Kenyon might call Italy’s “imminent emergencies”
(Hawthorne, The Marble Faun 16). Crawford, a sculptor, works toward something “permanent,”
suggesting that his art will be far from dead or deadened, that he knows how to convey fleshly
movement in marble.
Fuller complains throughout the dispatches about Americans who travel to Italy and form
communities with other Americans; these artists and writers often drifted from studio to studio,
overlooking Italian people. She argues that the Anglo-American literati became so enveloped in
the idea of Italy that they failed to see Italian people as people. This apathetic disposition
became a demoralizing reality for Fuller, whose journalism had always been grounded in
humanitarian principles. She writes that Americans have a moral obligation to act, because of all
modern nations, the United States should understand Italian people’s desire to form a unified
republic. Her references to the dilettanti, the soldati, and the civic guard are, together, telling
pleas for Americans to think, to feel, but most importantly to act empathetically on behalf of
Italians, not merely to gawk at the artwork housed in their studios and their museums. On 20
February 1849, she expresses her disappointment in Thomas Hicks, who painted the most
58
See dispatch no. 17, published 27 November 1847.
74
famous portrait of Fuller.59 Fuller and Hicks witness the “Fundamental Decree of the
Constitutional Assembly of Rome” together, but her dispatch reveals that she experienced this
crucial moment in Risorgimento history with anticipation while he watched impassively.
“Again,” Fuller confesses, “I must mention a remark of his as a specimen of the ignorance in
which Americans usually remain during their flighty visits to these scenes, where they associate
only with one another” (Dispatches from Europe 258). As “the great bell of the Capitol gave
forth its solemn melodies; the cannon answered; while the crowd shouted, viva la Republica!
viva Italia!” (257). Fuller becomes overwhelmed with sympathetic or empathetic patriotism:
“The imposing grandeur of the spectacle to me gave new force to the thought that already
swelled my heart; my nerves thrilled, and I longed to see in some answering glance a spark of
Rienzi, a little of that soul which made my country what she is” (257–258). Yet even as she
focuses her attention on reporting the event itself and her own sense of awe, she is horrified by
Hicks’s indifference.
Throughout the dispatch, Fuller renders Hicks an anonymous bystander, identified only
by his nationality: “The American at my side remained impassive” (257).60 “Receiving all his
birthright from a triumph of Democracy,” Fuller continues, “he was quite indifferent to this
manifestation on this consecrated spot. Passing the Winter in Rome to study Art, he was
insensible to the artistic beauty of the scene—insensible to this new life of that spirit from which
all the forms he gazes at in galleries emanated. He ‘did not see the use of these popular
demonstrations’” (257–258). From Fuller’s perspective, Hicks remains numb to the pivotal days
and hours that will define his own historical moment in Italy. Whereas Crawford’s involvement
59
Hicks painted Fuller in 1848. Fuller is sitting in the Doge’s Palace, and the Venetian lagoon is visible in the
background of the portrait. Hicks’s portrait is part of the National Portrait Gallery Collection in Washington, D.C.
See dispatch no. 28, published 4 April 1849.
60
Larry Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, however, identify “The American” to be Thomas Hicks (257).
75
in the Risorgimento shows how he combines his empathetic aesthetics with his empathetic
politics, Fuller condemns Hicks precisely because he doesn’t find the ceremony to be beautiful.
Yet even after this damning appraisal, Fuller reflects on the immediacy of the moment
and reconstructs the conversation that she had with Hicks:
“The people seem only to be looking on; they take no part.”
“What people?” said I.
“Why, these round us; there is no other people.”
There are a few beggars, errand-boys and nurse-maids.
“The others are only soldiers.”
“Soldiers! The Civic Guard; all the decent men in Rome.” (258)
Fuller rarely reports her impressions of Rome and of Florence as real-time conversations; this
dialogue interrupts the impersonal prose we’re accustomed to reading, and it conveys the sense
of immediacy Fuller, and even Hicks, likely felt. It is disorientating: the only indication of who
says what is the single first-person pronoun after “‘What people?’” (258). It’s almost as if Fuller
is making us read between the lines before matching the words with the person who says them.
Although it may be difficult at first to attribute the right lines to Fuller and the right lines to
Hicks, it’s clear their impressions of the civic guard are radically different. The repetitions—of
“‘people’” and of “‘soldiers’”—highlight the discrepancies between their worldviews and may
even convey the rushed nature of their exchange. By distancing their personal conversation from
the other people in the crowd, and even from the rest of the public dispatch, Fuller shows how
the soldiers recede into the urban chaos, at least from Hicks’s perspective. While she is
overcome by the momentous occasion, it seems to be lost on Hicks, who is unaffected by the
soldiers’ presence among the beggars, the errand-boys, and the nurse-maids. For though Hicks
76
mentions the soldiers before Fuller, he says they’re “‘only’” soldiers, while she says they’re “‘all
the decent men in Rome’” (258).
Like the narrator of The Marble Faun, Hicks appears desensitized to the soldiers. While
he sees them as people among the beggars, the errand-boys, and the nurse-maids, he doesn’t
appreciate the ceremony of the occasion, and they don’t hold historical, or potential historical,
significance for him. Unlike Crawford, who “had the just feeling to join the guard,” Hicks is
disinterested in the Italian moment. It’s clear that this experience rattles Fuller, though, because
it reveals Hicks’s true character. Though he refers to the crowd as “the people” (Fuller’s italics),
he seems to be mocking their democratic principles. Indeed, he doesn’t see Italian people,
especially poor Italian people, as people. For as impassive as he is next to Fuller, she suggests
that he sees Italians as passive observers of this occasion. When she pushes him to explain
himself (“‘What people?’ said I”), his narrow perspective becomes clear to her. At first, Hicks
just points to the soldiers, and when he finally explains himself, he says they’re “‘only soldiers,’”
suggesting their mere ceremonial importance among the crowd. Though Fuller doesn’t criticize
Hicks openly (she lets his words stand alone), the dialogue suggests why he is fundamentally
uninvolved in the Italian moment. Their conversation also shows how his vision, especially his
artistic vision, affects his politics and his aesthetics. That Hicks doesn’t understand the beggars,
the errand-boys, the nurse-maids, and the soldiers a “people” suggests his limited point of view:
like the other American artists and writers Fuller criticizes, Hicks sees Italy as a place to work,
not as a subject on its own.
This moment in Fuller’s dispatches parallels the ongoing debate between Kenyon and
Miriam about present-tense representation. Their conversation about The Dying Gladiator is just
one of many throughout the novel in which Kenyon, Miriam, and even the narrator interrogate
77
the politicoaesthetic meaning of sculpture. Miriam’s hesitations over Kenyon’s work reveal, by
extension, their respective political, or apolitical, dispositions. Their conversations stand out
because they’re not often read together. Indeed, they do not belong to one of the novel’s dyads:
the two romantic couples (Miriam and Donatello, Hilda and Kenyon) or the gendered pairings
(Miriam and Hilda, Donatello and Kenyon). Instead, they form a different kind of pair, one that
asks us to focus attention on competing artistic modes. Halfway through the novel, Miriam tours
Kenyon’s studio. Kenyon confesses to Miriam that their discussions about the virtues of
sculpture over painting (or painting over sculpture) are useful, since they help him to think about
clay and marble on a much more fundamental level. Unlike the other sculptors who belong to
his circle, Miriam doesn’t take certain ideas about sculptural representation for granted: “‘I love
to have painters see my work. Their judgment is unprejudiced, and more valuable than that of
the world generally, from the light which their own art throws on mine. More valuable, too, than
that of my brother-sculptors, who never judge me fairly—nor I them, perhaps’” (Hawthorne, The
Marble Faun 117). While Kenyon finds this experience to be a generative one, the clay and the
marble bodies crowding the space unnerve Miriam.
For Miriam, this sculptural process demands an artificial stillness of its subjects and of its
artists. “‘No; I will not touch clay; it is earthly and human,’” Miriam tells Kenyon, “‘I have
come to try whether there is any calm and coolness among your marbles. My own art is too
nervous, too passionate, too full of agitation, for me to work at it whole days together, without
intervals of repose. So, what have you to show me?’” (116–117). While her hesitations before
The Dying Gladiator seem to be about marble specifically, this moment shows how she is
troubled by the artistic process as much as she is by the stony bodies. The Dying Gladiator
bothered Miriam because the ancient artist rendered “intervals between two breaths” in stone, but
78
now she’s troubled by Kenyon’s clay, which seems equally dead or deadening in its state of
necessary “repose” (117). Far from prolonging fleeting persons or moments, Kenyon’s clay
bodies resemble lifeless flesh, at least from Miriam’s perspective. For her, the clay is creepy, not
only because the color and the texture have a corpselike quality, but also because the clay figures
are mere intermediaries: these clay figures are temporary realizations, marking the “intervals”
between sculptural conception and marble (117).61 As Kenyon walks Miriam through his studio
and shows her how he works from idea to clay and from clay to marble, they return to many of
the same questions first posed at the Capitol: can sculpture represent temporality? does the taste
for neoclassical sculpture suggest perverse correlations between contemporary figures and their
classical antecedents? can a work of art outlive its subject or its artist? who really makes a
sculpture? a sculptor? or the group of artisans who chisel the sculpture’s features?
Kenyon shows Miriam a statue of a pearl-fisher in the moment just after his death,
forever at rest with “the rich shells” and “the seaweeds” on the ocean floor (117). The narrator
suggests that this sculpture is defined by its allegorical meaning: Kenyon’s pearl-fisher, “a
beautiful youth,” “entangled” himself “in the weeds at the bottom of the sea, and lay dead among
the pearl-oysters, the rich shells, and the seaweeds” (117). Far from valorizing the pearl-fisher’s
ability to distinguish potential riches from flotsam, the sculpture shows how these things are “all
of like value to him now” (117). Kenyon’s pearl-fisher appears as a damning embodiment of
greed. It renders a passing moment permanent—unflatteringly permanent. Indeed, the pearlfisher’s death is immortalized by his grasping desire. Ultimately, the pearls, the weeds, and the
greedy youth become one: not only because they decay on the ocean floor together but also
61
“In his last finished novel,” Gollin and Idol argue, “Hawthorne repeatedly made paintings the middle term in a
complex interchange between the creator and perceiver, one that defines them both” (110).
79
because Kenyon carves the pearl-fisher’s stiffened body from the same material as the pearls and
the weeds.
Miriam’s response to the pearl-fisher echoes her response to The Dying Gladiator: she
understands both figures to be parables of representation, and each assumes a state of repose that
isn’t really repose. “‘The poor young man has perished among the prizes that he sought,’”
Miriam tells Kenyon, “‘But what a strange efficacy there is in Death! If we cannot all win
pearls, it causes an empty shell to satisfy us just as well. I like this statue, though it is too cold
and stern in its moral lesson; and, physically, the form has not settled itself into sufficient
repose’” (117). While Miriam doesn’t compare the pearl-fisher’s insufficient repose to The
Dying Gladiator, the conversation turns again toward the moral potential that this anticipatory
posture allegorizes. For Kenyon, The Dying Gladiator fails to represent “a moral standstill”
because it exaggerates the physical standstill. For Miriam, likewise, the pearl-fisher’s stillness is
overwrought: his stony “Death” renders his “moral lesson” too “cold” and too “stern” (117).
Indeed, the pearl-fisher seems to be Kenyon’s sculptural response to The Dying Gladiator. For if
Miriam criticized The Dying Gladiator because it monumentalizes the “intervals between two
breaths” in stone, then Kenyon’s sculptural response circumvents the moment between living
and not living: the pearl-fisher has to be dead within the sculpture’s narrative, or implied
narrative, in order to hold any moral meaning (17). Though Miriam acknowledges that this
statue is beautiful, her criticism suggests a tentative skepticism about Kenyon’s worldview. It’s
almost as if this statue reveals to Miriam a coldness or a sternness in Kenyon, suggesting that he
is prone to a clay- or a marble-like morbidity and that he is accustomed to fixed representations
of morality.
80
Repose seems to have been a touchstone for Hawthorne and for Fuller. Across the
dispatches, the word repose figures as a euphemism for revolution, or, even more often, for the
sense of world-weariness she felt over the revolution. Fuller’s most overwrought apostrophe to
repose appears in a dispatch dated 2 December 1848: “Repose! for whatever be the revolutions,
tumults, panics, hopes of the present day, still the temper of life here is Repose” (238).62 Like
Miriam and Kenyon, Fuller associates repose with Death, imminent Death, and, perhaps most
importantly, the melodrama of mid-nineteenth-century Italy. At the end of her meditation on the
calm of the Winter of 1848 (as opposed the Spring of 1848 and the Spring of 1849), she
describes the recent “Rest” in terms of a yet-suspended internment: “Burial-place so full of spirit
that Death itself seems no longer cold; oh let me rest here, too! Rest, here, seems possible;
meseems myriad lives still linger here, awaiting some one great summons” (238). While
Hawthorne may not have had this particular dispatch in mind, it is representative of Fuller’s
repeated associations between the Risorgimento and the ongoing sense of repose that defined
1848 and 1849.
Kenyon’s pearl-fisher may be, in fact, an overt allusion to Fuller’s death.63 On 19 July
1850, the Elizabeth (the ship carrying Fuller, Giovanni Ossoli, and Angelo Eugenio Filippo
(Nino) Ossoli, from Rome to New York) sank just off the coast of Fire Island. Fuller, Ossoli,
and their child were among the people who drowned. Many believe that the Carrara marble
popular among American sculptors in Rome, in Florence, and back in the United States
overburdened the ship and was responsible for the tragedy. Among the cargo never recovered
62
See dispatch no. 26, published 26 January 1849.
It’s clear Hawthorne had a real sculpture in mind. In the “Preface” to The Marble Faun, he writes, “Having
imagined a sculptor in this romance, it was necessary to provide him with such works in marble as should be in
keeping with the artistic ability which he was supposed to possess. With this view, the author laid felonious hands
upon a certain bust of Milton and a statue of a pearl diver, which he found in the studio of Mr. PAUL AKERS, and
secretly conveyed them to the premises of his imaginary friend, in the Via Frezza” (4).
63
81
was Hiram Powers’s bust of John C. Calhoun and, purportedly, Fuller’s The History of the
Roman Revolution.64 Journalists writing for the New-York Daily Tribune continued to run
stories about this shipwreck long after the news first broke, perhaps because Fuller, one of their
own, was never recovered. In the days and the weeks afterward, journalists in New York
appealed to residents off the coast of Fire Island to update readers about the search for Fuller’s
body. While they were never found, there were reports, as late as 27 July 1850, that her clothing
and her child’s clothing had been looted alongside other valuables that were never recovered.65
To be sure, there is no easy parallel between the Elizabeth and the pearl-fisher in
Kenyon’s studio. Yet even as late as 1860, Hawthorne’s readers in Concord, Boston, and New
England would have received the subject of drowning sharply. Coupled with Miriam’s interest
in the pearl-fisher’s “moral lesson,” the sculpture may have had many thinking of Fuller.66
Hawthorne’s semi-affectionate critiques of Fuller were well-known by 1859, especially for their
catalogues of her self-righteous public postures; however, his associative interest in the name
Margaret and the word Pearl date back to 1842. “Pearl—the English of Margaret—,”
Hawthorne writes on 1 June 1842, “a pretty name for a girl in a story” (The American Notebooks
242). Although Hawthorne recorded this detail in his private papers, and it is most often read in
64
See dispatch no. 15, published 11 September 1847. “As to the Eve and the Greek Slave,” Fuller writes, “I could
only join with the rest of the world in the admiration of their beauty and the fine feeling of nature which they
exhibit. The statue of Calhoun is full of power, simple and majestic in attitude and expression. In busts Powers
seems to me unrivaled; still, he ought not to spend his best years on an employment which cannot satisfy his
ambition nor develop his powers. If our country loves herself, she will order from him some great work before the
prime of his genius has been frittered away and his best years spent on lesser things” (142–143).
65
In an article titled “Proceedings against the plunderers of the Elizabeth,” a New-York Daily Tribune journalist
reported: “Upon the person of one woman was found a dress, supposed to have belonged to Madame Ossoli, and
there are reasons to suppose that this dress was taken from the body, with the money and jewels which she was
known to have tied about her waist. Several of her relatives who have been to the Island are of the opinion that her
body was washed ashore, plundered by the pirates and then secretly buried. In one house was also found the marble
bust of a child, which is in the possession of the officers” (27 July 1850).
66
Hawthorne’s representations of drowning date back as early as 1852. The Blithedale Romance models Zenobia
on Fuller. The American Notebooks from this period suggest that Hawthorne modeled Zenobia’s drowning on
Martha Hunt’s. Hunt committed suicide in the Concord River, and Hawthorne was one of the people who searched
for her body. Still, Fuller’s shipwreck haunts readings of The Blithedale Romance, because it thinly fictionalizes the
rest of her life.
82
conversation with The Scarlet Letter, it’s clear that the word pearl held a symbolic or even
hypersymbolic meaning within his canon. Miriam’s queasiness in the face of the pearl-fisher
may be immediate (the drowned figure itself is unnerving), but it may also be an allusion to
extra-textual tragedies subtly linking New England and Italy at mid-century.
Kenyon, like many real of the real sculptors who populated Rome during the 1850s and
the 1860s, sculpts antebellum civic leaders while working across the ocean. He believes that this
work is meaningful precisely because it reminds him of the vulnerability of the human figure,
whether it’s made of marble, bronze, or flesh. “There were,” Hawthorne writes, “several
portrait-busts, comprising those of two or three of the illustrious men of our own country, whom
Kenyon, before he left America, had asked permission to model. He had done so, because he
sincerely believed that, whether he wrought the busts in marble or bronze, the one would corrode
and the other crumble, in the long lapse of time, beneath these great men’s immortality” (The
Marble Faun 118). Unlike Miriam, who understands sculpture to be a decidedly fixed form,
these busts remind Kenyon of what corrodes, what crumbles, and what doesn’t last. Far from
wanting to restrict a person’s corporeal figure to clay or to marble silhouettes, Kenyon hopes to
transcend these mortal bodies. He contends that his busts and his full sculptures exaggerate the
subjects’ illustriousness. Still, even he recognizes that this enduring mode cannot represent the
much more immaterial greatness that could outlast clay, marble, or flesh bodies.
The narrator undercuts this appraisal (that Kenyon’s art claims a modest historicity) with
renewed doubts about whether the present will ever rival the past, especially when it’s
represented in stone. “Possibly, however,” he hedges, “the young artist may have underestimated the durability of his material. Other faces there were, too, of men, who (if the brevity
of their remembrance, after death, can be argued from their little value in life) should have been
83
represented in snow rather than marble” (118). The narrator’s idea that the eroding faces “should
have been represented” in snow (instead of dust) seems to be a subtle critique of their immediate
relevance (118). It’s as if he associates the “brevity” of snowfall upon this earth with his own
fleeting interest in an otherwise anonymous person’s life (118). At the same time, the snow
recalls Miriam’s aversion to the “coolness” of Kenyon’s marble. When the faces dissolve, the
narrator contends, it won’t just be the result of time. Instead, this cold erosion will mark the
waning importance of a particular person to a particular moment.
Hawthorne’s narrator worries that future generations won’t be able to discern who should
and shouldn’t populate their historical memory. Neoclassical sculpture became wildly popular
during the 1830s and the 1840s, and commissions for busts of statesmen overwhelmed Roman
studios. Robert Byer suggests that this vogue for marble reached its height in the United States
during the middle of the nineteenth century. At this cultural moment, Americans who did not
experience the American Revolution firsthand were yearning for a collective memory, especially
a collective historical memory, and these monuments helped to make the not-so-distant past
grand. Patrons of sculpture, the inheritors of a Revolutionary memory that was just two or three
generations old, often saw the marble embodiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century heroes
as mnemonic registers for a nation in need of ideological unification (Byer 170–177). In The
Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s narrator sees these marble embodiments in their unfinished states,
before they are shipped back to the Capitol in Washington D.C. or to other civic buildings across
the country, including state houses, court houses, and public libraries. Officials from the Capitol
imported the busts and the sculptures that were to populate its halls from expatriate artists; this
transatlantic economy is strangely responsible for the nineteenth-century iconography that
became our historiographic blueprint.
84
From the narrator’s perspective, the vogue for busts and sculptures is perverse, not least
because the artists memorializing American history were expatriates who modeled fantasies of
the United States from their studios in Rome and in Florence. The narrator is, however, much
more interested in the sheer volume of sculptural subjects these patrons deemed worthy of
monumentalization: “It is especially singular that Americans should care about perpetuating
themselves in this mode,” the narrator complains, “The brief duration of our families, as a
hereditary household, renders it next to a certainty that the great-grandchildren will not know
their father’s grandfather, and that, half-a-century hence, at farthest, the hammer of the
auctioneer will thump its knock-down blow against his blockhead, sold at so much for the pound
of stone!” (118–119). Hawthorne’s depiction of the artists and their patrons is counterintuitive,
even cheeky, for in the face of these figures, the narrator imagines the future, not the past: “And
it ought to make us shiver, the idea of leaving our features to be a dusty-white ghost among
strangers in another generation, who will take our nose between their thumb and fingers, (as we
have seen men do by Caesar’s,) and infallibly break it off, if they can do so, without detection!”
(119). The narrator’s plural first-person pronouns are oddly conscious of his past- and presenttense compatriots; his rhetorical inclusiveness seems to mock the desires for collective historical
memory that defined mid-nineteenth-century America.
Indeed, Kenyon’s “real-life” compatriots—among them, Crawford, Powers, William
Wetmore Story, and Harriet Hosmer—were commissioned to sculpt busts and sculptures of civic
figureheads while living overseas. Powers sculpted a number of American statesmen. He made
busts of Andrew Jackson, John Marshall (Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835),
and John C. Calhoun (Vice President of the United States from 1825 to 1832 under John Quincy
Adams and Andrew Jackson; this sculpture was lost with the Elizabeth). He also made several
85
busts of George Washington. Powers’s sculptures of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson
stand in the Senate and the House Collections, respectively, at the United States Capitol. Though
these political figures are famous today, Powers is most famous for The Greek Slave, which
debuted at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Crawford was, in some ways, much more institutionally
recognized than Powers. Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace is the statue crowning the top
of the United States Capitol, and he designed the pediment inside the Rotunda. Among his nongovernmental statues are the Dying Indian Chief Contemplating the Progress of Civilization and
the Mexican Girl Dying. Story, like Powers, is often read as one of the sources for Kenyon’s
character; he also sculpted Marshall. His Cleopatra (whose face was modelled on Sojourner
Truth’s), in fact, appears as a fictional piece within Kenyon’s studio.67 Though Hosmer is most
famous for Zenobia in Chains, Beatrice Cenci, and The Sleeping Faun, which all make veiled
appearances in The Marble Faun, she also sculpted a number of contemporary political figures:
Isabella, Queen of Spain; Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, who was exiled by Guiseppe
Garibaldi in 1860; as well as Thomas Hart Benton, a U.S. senator from Missouri who served
from 1821 to 1851. Benton was known for his support of westward expansion.68 Kenyon and
the other “real” sculptors may not have identified with their sculptural subjects’ public personae.
Regardless of whether they agreed, disagreed, or were ambivalent about these people’s beliefs,
however, the expatriate artists were responsible for memorializing their subjects’ ideas in
tangible form. By historicizing people (queens, presidents, vice presidents, judges, senators, or
the other people who become figureheads for nation-states), Kenyon tacitly agrees that their
67
Hawthorne’s narrator dwells on Kenyon’s Cleopatra in chapter xiv. I’ll return to Roman Cleopatras in chapter
two, where I discuss Dorothea Casaubon’s and Will Ladislaw’s encounter with a mis-identified Cleopatra (The
Sleeping Ariadne) in the Vatican.
68
Though we may not be familiar with Benton for his allegiances to causes in favor of Manifest Destiny, his image
is probably familiar to people who have seen the oft-reproduced photograph of Hosmer standing on a ladder next to
the clay study of the man, two or three times her height.
86
political philosophies are worth committing to stone. For if Kenyon believes that the bronze and
the marble bodies will ultimately be effaced, then his sculptural subjects’ characters are what
will outlast such material representation.
The conversation between Miriam and Kenyon in his studio addresses these questions of
monumentalization: what can and can’t be represented? what should and shouldn’t be
memorialized? and, if American art is to be defined by sculpture, then how and why do they
update history while working with the literal dust of Italy: Carrara marble? Like the narrator,
Miriam is skeptical about the present-tense relevance of sculpture: “‘except for portrait-busts,
sculpture has no longer a right to claim any place among living arts. It has wrought itself out,
and come fairly to an end. There is never a new group now-a-days; never, even, so much as a
new attitude” (124). In order to support her point, Miriam compares Kenyon to “real-life”
sculptors, and she challenges him to consider his art against Horatio Greenough’s and
Crawford’s. “Greenough (I take my examples among men of merit) imagined nothing new,”
Miriam tells Kenyon, “nor Crawford either, except in the tailoring line” (124). By placing
fictional and nonfictional sculptors side-by-side within Miriam’s speech, Hawthorne forces his
readers to reckon with their own present-tense historicity.
It’s strange, then, that in her most damning critique of sculpture, she suggests that it
cannot represent the present, and that even if it can represent something approximating the
present, it would be a pale shadow of a much more real past: “‘There are not—as you will
own—more than half-a-dozen positively original statues or groups in the world, and these few
are of immemorial antiquity. A person familiar with the Vatican, the Uffizi gallery, the Naples
gallery, and the Louvre, will at once refer any modern production to its antique prototype—
which, moreover, had begun to get out of fashion, even in old Roman days’” (124). Miriam’s
87
diatribe is a culmination of sorts. It articulates the queasiness she feels over sculpture as early as
the first and the second chapters at the Capitol. It also gives voice to the narrator’s much more
hesitating interest in Kenyon’s work. For just as the narrator questions whether sculpture will, in
fact, efface connections between past, present, and future generations, Miriam worries that this
art is necessarily out-of-touch with the contemporary moment.
Kenyon, however, believes sculpture is the future of art, especially American art. “‘I do
not own it,’” Kenyon tells Miriam, “‘yet cannot utterly contradict you, as regards the actual state
of the art. But as long as the Carrara quarries still yield pure blocks, and while my own country
has marble mountains, probably as fine in quality, I shall steadfastly believe that future sculptors
will revive this noblest of the beautiful arts, and people the world with new shapes of delicate
grace and massive grandeur” (124–125). Kenyon’s asseveration that this mode has continued
relevance, even as far away as the United States, was one Fuller shared, despite the reservations
about art and artists that she expresses throughout her dispatches. On 20 March 1849, Fuller
catalogues the sculptors and the painters who belong to her expatriate circle, and she argues that
mid-nineteenth-century sculpture will ultimately be a source of national pride, precisely because
it revives a classical aesthetic: “Among the Sculptors new names rise up to show that this is
decidedly a province for hope in America. I look upon this as the natural talent of an American,
and have no doubt that glories will be displayed by our sculptors unknown to classic art” (267).69
Like Kenyon, Fuller sees sculpture as a forward-looking art, one that is defined by the very
“living” qualities Miriam cannot discern within the walls of this studio.
Miriam witnesses Kenyon’s sculptures in various stages of completion: there are some
studies, some figures in clay and in marble, and some blocks of marble from which figures have
yet to emerge. While she’s critical of sculpture as a mode, she’s equally interested in the process
69
See dispatch no. 29, published 16 May 1849.
88
that transforms blocks of marble into human likenesses. Despite her qualms about the
“coldness” or the “coolness” of the stone, she seems to will the stone into having a buried human
consciousness that that the sculptor or the chiseller is to liberate. “Miriam stopt, an instant, in an
antechamber, to look at a half-finished bust,” Hawthorne writes, “the features of which seemed
to be struggling out of the stone, and, as it were, scattering and dissolving its hard substance by
the glow of feeling and intelligence” (The Marble Faun 115–116). Alongside the conversation
between Miriam and Kenyon about the future of sculpture, the narrator dilates on the real human
bodies who populate the studio and give form to the clay and the marble ones.
Miriam, too, becomes distracted by the chisellers, whose labor enlivens the otherwise
quiet studio: “Another bust was nearly completed, though still one of Kenyon’s most
trustworthy assistants was at work, giving delicate touches, shaving off an impalpable
something, and leaving little heaps of marble dust to attest it” (116). The narrator assumes
Miriam’s perspective, here, and imagines what she must be thinking and feeling in the face of
Kenyon’s workmen. “As the skillful workman gave stroke after stroke of the chisel, with
apparent carelessness, but sure effect,” Hawthorne continues, “it was impossible not to think that
the outer marble was merely an extraneous environment; the human countenance, within its
embrace, must have existed there since the limestone ledges of Carrara were first made” (116).
The phrase “it was impossible not to think” shows how the narrator tries to align his perspective
with Miriam’s and, by extension, align theirs with ours; and it’s telling that he follows this
rhetorical elision with a description of “the human countenance” emerging from what had
seemed to be cold or cool stone.
Miriam recognizes the chisellers as the people who unearth “human countenance” from
within the marble, brushing away the dust of the past and realizing the vibrancy associated with
89
classical and neoclassical sculptures: “In Italy, there is a class of men whose merely mechanical
skill is perhaps more exquisite than was possessed by the ancient artificers, who wrought out the
designs of Praxiteles, or, very possibly, by Praxiteles himself. Whatever of illusive
representation can be effected in marble, they are capable of achieving, if the object be before
their eyes” (115). The narrator becomes so absorbed with Miriam’s interest in the chisellers that
they are filtered, narratively, through her perspective. Indeed, the moment when she realizes
Kenyon doesn’t do the work himself verges on free indirect discourse and is suspended,
narratively, from the rest of the conversation (the one I’ve detailed above). That the narrator
pauses and prefaces the conversation between Kenyon and Miriam with her impressions of the
chisellers is telling. For Miriam’s consciousness reveals that this realization changes not only
what she thinks about sculpture but also what she thinks about the necessary relationship
between sculpture and human drudgery:
The sculptor has but to present these men with a plaister-cast of his design, and a
sufficient block of marble, and tell them that the figure is imbedded in the stone,
and must be freed from its encumbering superfluities; and, in due time, without
the necessity of his touching the work with his own finger, he will see before him
the statue that is to make him renowned. His creative power has wrought it with a
word. In no other art, surely, does genius find such effective instruments, and so
happily relieve itself of the drudgery of actual performance; doing wonderfully
nice things, by the hands of other people, when, it may be suspected, they could
not always be done by the sculptor’s own. (115)
Though she once thought that this work was the immaculate rendering of a singular artist, she
now sees it as a belabored process. Miriam’s new sensitivity to the chisellers alters her ideas
90
about sculpture as seen in her responses to The Faun of Praxiteles and The Dying Gladiator.
What Miriam admires, the “buttons,” the “button-holes,” the details that date her “present epoch
of taste,” are not Kenyon’s work, “but that of some nameless machine in human shape” (115).
Indeed, her response to Kenyon’s pearl-fisher shows how she’s even more attuned to the
humanity, or the inhumanity, of the marble.
Miriam is the only character who notices the “nameless machine[s] in human shape[s],” a
phrase that exaggerates this expatriate population’s insularity (115). For while Kenyon and the
other Anglo-American sculptors search for “human shape[s]” in stones, they overlook the real
“human shape[s]” who surround them in their studios. The narrator’s aside suggests that Miriam
realizes the subtle irony of this situation: though these chisellers are the people who realize
fleshlike bodies from clay and marble, they themselves remain impersonal figures within the
studios and within the expatiates’ vision of Rome much more generally. Miriam’s awareness of
the chisellers may be, in fact, the most sustained meditation on Italian people across the entire
romance (with the exception of Donatello, who is, from the start, the sculpture-like faun).
Miriam’s discomfort that the sculptors don’t really sculpt is an aesthetic critique that also
reveals a quintessential mid-nineteenth-century sensibility. Her interest in the chisellers echoes
the political, or even the apolitical, understanding of Risorgimento circulating among the most
famous Victorian art critics. She doesn’t mention Ruskin here, but her ideas about what good art
should be or do, and how one should interpret it, parallel his interest in laborers throughout The
Stones of Venice (which I discuss at length in chapters five and six). Miriam’s observations are
the only instances in the narrative when Italian people appear as people worthy of sustained
attention. It’s telling that Italian people populate Kenyon’s studio, a place where sculptors and
chisellers memorialize the American Revolution, the presidents, the vice presidents, and the
91
other figureheads of civic life overseas. Miriam’s queasiness about what the sculptor does and
doesn’t sculpt epitomizes the other narrative non-handlings of the Italian present tense. Though
they remain nameless and nationless within the text, the Italian chisellers are, from Miriam’s
perspective, compelling human subjects. Indeed, if “the human countenance” Kenyon imagines
is to be realized, then these chisellers are the people who will mediate between his ideas and clay
and marble. Likewise, Ruskin’s rallying cry for the Gothic was about artisanship (the masons,
the stone-cutters, the glass-makers) as much as it was about formal properties popularized during
the fourteenth century.
Miriam’s interest in the chisellers is, too, decidedly human. For just as Ruskin
acknowledges that we will never know the name of the masons who built the now-famous
cathedrals, Miriam realizes that the chisellers in Kenyon’s studio will monumentalize presenttense Americans, whether their blocks of Carrara remain in Rome or are shipped overseas to
Washington, D.C. Just as the Risorgimento remains implicit in The Stones of Venice, it also
remains unstated or understated in The Marble Faun.70 Still, for Miriam and for Ruskin alike,
the anonymous laborers embody what George Eliot was to call “unhistoric acts” (Middlemarch
785). Miriam’s sensitivity to the chisellers’ “impalpable” personhood shows exactly how many
present-tense stories remain untold.
Ultimately, these untold stories may be the greatest monument Fuller leaves us in the
history preserved through her decidedly present-tense dispatches. Five years after Channing
70
See Robert Levine for a reading of Hawthorne’s Ruskinian sensibility and its connections to Whig and
Republican rhetoric: “Moreover, while Rome was regularly imaged in Whig and Republican ‘free labor’ rhetoric as
the embodiment of a corrupt ‘slave power,’ one senses that underlying the Ruskin-influenced Gothic aestheticism of
Jarves, Norton, and many other American travelers in Rome during the 1850s and early 1860s was an attraction, less
to the Church’s institutional power, than to an ideal unity apprehended beneath the surface of Rome’s unappealing
sociopolitical condition. Swayed by Ruskin’s evocative celebration of Gothic unity—an aesthetic, as he put it in
Modern Painters, which binds ‘things separately imperfect into a perfect whole’ (95)—numerous American cultural
commentators found in the Gothic an objective correlative, as it were, to their larger political and social desires for a
‘perfect whole’” (23–24).
92
received Fuller’s 1847 letter about “the state of the people,” “the state of the race,” and the
meaning of “Art,” he edited Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli with Emerson and Clarke. It has
since become a standard source of information on Fuller’s life, even though many accuse these
editors of sensationalizing or oversimplifying the scope of her career. One of the most-cited
passages compares Fuller to “a living statue” (238). While the description is often attributed to
Emerson, he claims it was written by an anonymous correspondent of Fuller’s: “Margaret was
one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist,
but as a work of art” (238).71 “She looked upon herself as a living statue,” the letter-writer
asserts, “which would always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the
most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was
annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone
did justice to her” (238). Given Fuller’s private and public disavowal of “Art,” it’s ironic that
her memoirists chose to include this description in their preface to her much more private
correspondence. The letter-writer’s equivocating language is strange on a number of levels: it’s
not just that she is “a statue,” or that she is “a living statue,” but that she sees herself as
statuesque, which implies a kind of self-figuration.
If we are to read the line as a compliment, then the person seems to be suggesting
something about Fuller’s being fixed, morally fixed, or undeviating in her various intellectual
commitments. Having read Fuller’s work across the 1840s, the letter-writer intuits that this
fixedness overdetermines the things Fuller considered to be beautiful, and the language in the
letter coyly teases Fuller for her relentless pursuit of what was “right” and “most fitting” (238).
By comparing Fuller to a statue upon a pedestal, the letter-writer seems to be criticizing her as
71
Emerson writes, “I am obliged to an ingenious correspondent for the substance of the following account of this
idiosyncrasy:—” (238).
93
much as he is eulogizing her. Fuller’s idealized proportions seem inhuman in their perfection,
and her position on the pedestal suggests the fragile nature of her transatlantic celebrity. The
letter-writer, perhaps unwittingly, ascribes to Fuller what art historians would term the canon,
meaning that her arms and her legs appear to be proportional with the rest of the body, even if
certain parts are exaggerated. To achieve this, the sculptor must imagine a vanishing point from
the perspective of those who stand beneath the statue itself. For the memoirist, the issue of
“point of view” is all the more peculiar since Fuller appears both as artist and as artistic subject.
The letter is a strange memorial, then, since it lionizes Fuller by re-casting a nonexistent selfportrait and idealizing the very art she often disavowed, both in her private and in her public
Roman correspondence.
In the wake of Fuller’s death, the idea of her statuesque rightness, or self-righteousness,
seems to have been a useful trope for those who wanted to caricature her stony, and often
moralistic, “point of view” (238).72 But if the suggestion of Fuller’s statuesque persona is a
backhanded compliment, it is a useful one, since it insinuates the debates about politicoaesthetic
ambivalence she establishes in her dispatches: can one believe that art is “important” and be
seriously interested in “the state of the people” or “the state of the race” at the same time (238)?
When Emerson’s letter-writer turns Fuller’s rhetoric against her, he also forces us to wonder how
72
Like Channing, Emerson, and Clarke, Hawthorne compares Fuller’s involvement in the Risorgimento—and the
obsession she seems to have had with improving her character—to the work of a sculptor. He finishes the paragraph
about Fuller’s History of the Roman Revolution by comparing the vulnerability of her fleshly life to “marble and
clay.” In April 1858, just before leaving Rome, Hawthorne writes, “It was such an awful joke, that she should have
resolved—in all sincerity, no doubt—to make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age; and to that end,
she set to work on her strong, heavy, unpliable, and, in many respects, defective and evil nature, and adorned it with
a mosaic of admirable qualities, such as she chose to possess; putting in here a splendid talent, and there a moral
excellence, and polishing each separate piece, and the whole together, till it seemed to shine afar and dazzle all who
saw it. She took credit to herself for having been her own Redeemer, if not her own Creator; and, indeed, she was
far more of a work of art than any of Mr. Mozier’s statues. But she was not working on an inanimate substance, like
marble or clay; there was something within her that she could not possibly come at, to re-create and refine it; and, by
and by, this rude old potency bestirred itself, and undid all the labour in of an eye. On the whole, I do not know but
I like her the better for it;—the better, because she proved herself a very woman, after all, and fell as the weakest of
her sisters might” (The French and Italian Notebooks 156–157).
94
she embodied rightness. While the image of Fuller as a statue on a pedestal may be easily
dismissed now, it’s an uncanny one for those who are interested in American letters between the
First and the Second Wars of Italian Independence. Indeed, Fuller’s 1847 worries over the
“right” balance of politics and aesthetics seem especially prescient when read in conversation
with Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, since Hawthorne likewise questions whether a statue can
represent human crises, and whether our desires to live and to act rightly may be incrusted in
clay, in marble, or even in prose.
95
CHAPTER 2
Rome, 1871–1892
“Experiments in Time”: the Risorgimento, the Unification of Italy, and Present Tenses in
Middlemarch
While Margaret Fuller’s New-York Daily Tribune dispatches (1846–1850) and Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) express politicoaesthetic ambivalence during the First and
the Second Italian Wars of Independence, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) was written
in the wake of the Third. Eliot’s Rome chapters (19–22) are turning points for Dorothea, for
Casaubon, and for Ladislaw, the three characters who travel to the Eternal City. Rome is the
place where Dorothea realizes her post-nuptial disappointment with Casaubon and her
burgeoning affection for Ladislaw. It is also the place where the three characters sharpen their
mnemonic understandings. Moreover, the characters’ travels from Middlemarch to Rome
heighten the narrator’s subtler interests in the generational gaps binding the “Old and Young”
characters to one another and to a much more removed historical period. When the characters
arrive in the Eternal City midway through Book II, the narrator turns from the sketch of “Miss
Brooke” (and others) to a historiographical study of Mrs. Casaubon (and others) abroad. Yet far
from depicting Dorothea as a singular heroine in Rome, Eliot intimates that this sojourn is a
narrative turning point: Dorothea, like her companions, is moved by the city because it
superimposes impressions of past- and present-tense events upon one another in jarring ways.
96
Indeed, the Rome chapters may be read as an extended meditation on chronology, or
achronology.73 For the narrator tells us in the opening line that this novel will be about time:
“Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how that mysterious mixture behaves
under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint
Theresa […]” (Eliot, Middlemarch 3). Within the walls of St. Peter’s (in chapters 19–22), the
characters realize the relative minuteness and the relative, if self-constructed, continuities of their
lives against the Belvedere Torso’s ever-suspended, ever-fragmented, and yet momentary
contortion. Eliot represents these epistemological crises—classical subjects for yearning poets
including Gordon, Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans and for writers of fiction and nonfiction
prose including Hawthorne—through a narrative that is self-conscious of its own discontinuities.
In fact, the narrator recounts the events that take place in Rome out of order: chapter 20 flashes
back to unnarrated events that precede chapter 19, and the events narrated in chapters 21 and 22
follow the events in chapter 19. Still, it’s clear Eliot always envisioned chapters 19–22 as a
continuous, if achronological, narrative whole. While revising Books II (“Old and Young”) and
III (“Waiting for Death”) for publication, she moved the Rome chapters from the third book to
the second, an editorial decision that should draw our attention to the thematic anachronisms of
the text.74 On a micro- and a macro- level (at the level of chapters and of books), then, Rome is
defined by meaningful shifts in narrative tense.
73
For discussions of history, historiography, and temporality in Middlemarch, see especially Michael York Mason,
Thomas Deegan, J. Hillis Miller, Alison Booth, Gerhard Joseph, Sophia Andres, Michael Carignan, Karen Chase,
Henry Staten, and Lilian Furst. “History has many dimensions, which move at different speeds,” Staten writes, “and
few novels represent as many of them, in as much detail, as does Middlemarch: rise of the professions, scientization
of medicine, development of modern party politics, increasing influence of the press, modernization of estate
agriculture, aristocratization of the bourgeoisie, increasing interpenetration of town and country, and more” (1003).
74
George Henry Lewes asked John Blackwood to publish the novel in eight parts in May 1871. Eliot had finished
the first three volumes by the first week of December 1870. “Miss Brooke,” the first volume, was published 1
December 1871. “Old and Young,” the second volume, was published 1 February 1872. Lewes mailed chapters
19–22 to Blackwood on 7 December 1871, after Eliot decided to move them from the third to the second volume.
“By this post I send you a batch of m.s. which we should like to set up in slips AT ONCE,” Lewes writes Blackwood
97
Yet chapters 19–22 are most famous for their geographical—not for their
chronological—discontinuities. Because Eliot details Dorothea’s simultaneous, twofold
relationships with Casaubon and with Ladislaw most fully in the Rome chapters, most critics
discuss them, at least in passing, in order to make sense of what happens in Middlemarch in
Books III–VIII. Since the novel, titled Middlemarch and subtitled A Study of Provincial Life,
reaches its crisis in Italy, not in England, it may be much more cosmopolitan than Eliot intimates
at first. Consequently, chapters 19–22 are a revelatory anomaly, and they mark a significant
turning point in the plot. For if the first book is titled “Miss Brooke,” suggesting Dorothea is the
singular heroine (for a marriage plot?), then we might expect the rest of the novel to follow her
romantic trajectory alone (leading to a final chapter called “Mrs. Casaubon” or “Mrs.
Ladislaw”?). Of course, Middlemarch isn’t just about Dorothea, and it also isn’t just about her
marriages to Casaubon and to Ladislaw. When she appears as a married woman in the second
book, where we witness her miserable honeymoon, it’s clear that this novel won’t follow a
marriage-plot trajectory.75 Rome, then, marks several kinds of metanarrative pivots: it upends
our chronological, geographical, and generic expectations for the novel. The subtitle A Study of
in a letter dated 7 December 1871; “We think that the absence of Dodo and her husband from Part II will be felt
injuriously and that the part would be greatly strengthened in interest if some of her story be introduced, and to make
way for it some scenes must be transposed to Part III. The question of how much may be transposed can't be settled
until we know how much what is now sent will make” (Eliot, Letters 224). George Haight notes that this letter
refers to chapters 19–22, which “were eventually transferred to Book II” (224). Both Eliot and Lewes were pleased
with the revision, which she requested exactly one week after the first volume was published. “The change in the
second part is I think an immense improvement and makes it most attractive,” Blackwood writes to Lewes in a letter
dated 31 December 1871 (230). Indeed, two days after the second volume was published (3 February 1872),
Blackwood confirmed Eliot’s intuition about the changes to Books II and III. “Part two will more than sustain the
reputation of Part 1,” Blackwood writes Lewes, “and as for Part three it is transcendent” (245).
75
The narrator reveals that this trip to Rome is a the Casaubons’ honeymoon in a gloss to chapter 20: “Nor can I
suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be
regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the
imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of
tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and
perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it
would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the
other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity” (Eliot, Middlemarch 182).
98
Provincial Life may seem a misnomer when the characters travel from Middlemarch to Rome,
since Eliot displaces us from the semi-rural setting; however, the characters’ impressions of the
Eternal City lead to a meditation on provinciality much more generally.76
I argue that Middlemarch is “a study of provincial life” in England and in Italy and that
the Roman interlude superimposes 1829–1832 both with much more distant pasts and with
present-tense events unfolding as Eliot was drafting and publishing the novel between 1869 and
1872. Because some of Eliot’s letters, journals, and essays on Italy suggest her ambivalence
about the Risorgimento, critics haven’t read the Rome chapters alongside events that took place
between 1870 (when “Miss Brooke” was first drafted) and 1872 (when “Old and Young” was
first published). In fact, most critics argue that Eliot was, and saw herself as, a Grand Tourist,
not as a traveller with serious allegiances to republican or to anti-republican causes, and they
often cite “Recollections of Italy 1860” and “Italy 1864,” which Eliot wrote immediately after
her second and her third trips, to support this claim. Indeed, Eliot wasn’t a mouthpiece for
republicanism or for anti-republicanism, and, as historians of the nineteenth century would
suggest, she and her compatriot travellers didn’t view the Unification as the inevitable
consequence of the Risorgimento she witnessed when she travelled to Italy from the 1840s to the
1860s. Still, Eliot’s five trips to Italy coincide with watershed moments in mid-nineteenthcentury peninsular history: first in 1849 (one year after the First War of Italian Independence);
second in 1860 (one year after the Second War); third in 1864; fourth in 1869 (one year before
Rome was annexed and two years after a failed annexation); and fourth in 1880 (when she
travelled to Venice, not to Rome, with her husband John Cross). While twentieth-century
historians/literary historians long understood the Unification of Italy to be the inevitable
76
“Rome in Middlemarch ensures that we do not think of the Midland Middlemarch as the heart of England,”
Hardy contends, “but Rome is not present to provide an image of centrality or stability. Rome displaces
Middlemarch, but offers ruins, confusion, deconstruction” (13).
99
consequence of the Risorgimento, it wasn’t a foregone plot with a foregone conclusion when
Eliot was travelling there from the 1840s to the 1860s. In fact, it’s important to remember that
she experienced the uncertain future of the not-yet Kingdom of Italy firsthand, during a period
when many were worried that what was happening there would affect what was happening at
home in Great Britain. The title Middlemarch may be the name of the town where the novel
begins and ends, then, but it also suggests the manner in which the novel mediates uncertain
English and Italian plots: the characters reconcile their pasts and their futures between these two
places.
In fact, Gillian Beer’s provocative essay “What’s Not in Middlemarch?” reminds us that
this novel is a product of 1871–1872, even if it is set from 1829 to 1832. By studying the
advertisements accompanying the eight serial installments of Middlemarch, Beer shows how
Eliot’s period novel was bookended with front- and back-page ephemera, advertisements for
products that filled Victorians’ day-to-day lives. Beer argues that this model was jolting in
meaningful ways, for it forced nineteenth-century subscribers to contend with continuities, and
discontinuities, between the early 1830s and the early 1870s. Eliot’s narrator reminds us, often
self-consciously, of the distance between her present moment and her characters’. Indeed,
Middlemarch is predicated on sustained apophases that reinforce this divide: by claiming she
doesn’t want to mention something, she does; by reminding us of the past, she also reminds us of
the present. For Beer, apophasis is geographical as much as it is a chronological. She argues
that this novel is coyly titled, since the plot transcends the borders of Middlemarch and of
England: “the main thing not to be found in Middlemarch, the town, is Middlemarch, the book,”
and the book “outgoes” the town “that is its ostensible topic” (17). “Middlemarch is provincial,”
she continues, “the writing of Middlemarch is urban, cosmopolitan even” (17). Indeed, readers
100
have long noted that this encyclopedic novel chronicles the ways provincial life both had and
hadn’t really changed between 1830 and 1870.77
Eliot herself confesses that Middlemarch is expansive, both in terms of volume and in
terms of what depicting “provincial life” entails. In a letter to François D’Albert Durade, dated
29 January 1872 (three days before “Old and Young” was first published), she writes: “There
are to be eight of these bi-monthly parts, so you perceive it will be a frightfully long book. But I
wanted to give a panoramic view of provincial life, which could not be done in small space”
(Eliot, Letters 241). Eliot’s “panoramic view of provincial life” extends from Middlemarch to
Rome in chapters 19–22. In fact, the Rome chapters underscore recent discussions about the
historicity of Middlemarch, especially if we consider them as a central, not as a peripheral,
“study” in Eliot’s “provincial” novel. While it may be tempting to read “provincial” as a
euphemism for small-minded—and, consequently, to pit Middlemarch and Rome against one
another—Eliot’s subtitle seems, rather, to intimate a regional compass for her characters. Yet
the regional compass Eliot imagines applies both to England and to Italy; provincialism wasn’t
bound to rural life in the British Isles as we might, at least at first, expect. Rome isn’t
synonymous with cosmopolitism, for Eliot, just as Middlemarch isn’t synonymous with
provincialism. Both cities are—at once—connected to and disconnected from surrounding
geopolitical landscapes. When the Rome chapters were published in February 1872, the city was
still “provincial” in many ways.
In 1829, Rome belonged to the Catholic Church (the Congress of Vienna returned it to
the Pope after Napoleon’s fall in 1814). By 1859, the Papal States were one of four discrete
77
Barbara Hardy, Andrew Thompson, Henry Staten, and Joel Brattin, and each suggest, in passing, that “the
provincial” worldview of the novel is breeched when Casaubon, Ladislaw, and especially Dorothea travel from
Middlemarch to Rome.
101
regions that did not belong to the United Provinces of Central Italy.78 Once surrounding regions
were annexed to the United Provinces between 1859 and 1861, Vittorio Emanuele II ruled the
entire peninsula (minus the Papal States and Venetia), which was then called the United
Kingdom of Italy. During this period, troops often traversed the Papal States as they marched
from what had been the Kingdom of Sicily to what had been the Kingdom of Sardinia, working
to unify the peninsula; Rome and Venice were the only major cities that remained un-unified.79
In 1861, however, Rome was declared the capital of the United Kingdom of Italy, even though it
was a sovereign region. It became increasingly isolated from the rest of the peninsula between
1861 and 1871, despite its central location, because Pope Pius IX wouldn’t relinquish it from the
Papal States to Vittorio Emanuele II.80 Ultimately, Venice was annexed in October 1866; Rome
78
In December 1859, Tuscany, Parma, and Modena joined with the Papal Legations to form the United Provinces
of Central Italy; the British encouraged the United Provinces to seek annexation by the Kingdom of Sardinia (which
then included Piedmont and Lombardy). By January 1860, four discrete regions remained: the Kingdom of
Piedmont-Sardinia (controlled by Vittorio Emanuele II); the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (the Kingdom of Sicily and
the Kingdom of Naples, controlled by Francis II); the Papal States (controlled by the Pope); and Venetia (controlled
by Franz Joseph II). For fuller historical context about the Second War of Independence, see Lucy Riall’s
Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State (chapter 1) and David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of
Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions, and their Peoples (chapter 7).
79
Between April and July 1860, the Kingdom of Two Sicilies grew increasingly vulnerable because Swiss
mercenaries were recalled from the region; in May 1860 Garibaldi led his famous I Mille Volunteers through the
region, and by the end of the summer, he annexed both Sicily and Naples to the United Provinces, under the control
of Vittorio Emanuele II. Garibaldi then turned north to conquer the Papal States—and, he hoped, Rome—in
September 1860; but he also needed to traverse Rome in order to meet the Sardinian army, which had turned south.
Had Garibaldi’s army and the Sardinian army been successful in the fall of 1860, the entire peninsula would have
been under the control of Vittorio Emanuele II. See Riall and Gilmour for further information.
80
Because Pope Pius IX supported the Papal Army through funds raised worldwide by Catholic sympathizers, there
was a standoff between Garibaldi and Napoleon III; Napoleon wouldn’t allow Garibaldi to conquer Rome because
he wanted it to remain a religious, not a secular, capital. Ultimately, the Sardinian army (led by Vittorio Emanuele
II) defeated the Papal army and marched southward to meet Garibaldi’s forces, but they left Rome untouched. By
March 1861, Rome and Venetia were the only parts of the peninsula not under the control of the United Provinces.
In March 1861, Vittorio Emanuele II was proclaimed the King of Italy and Rome was declared the capital, even
though it wasn’t yet part of the Kingdom. Vittorio Emanuele II was wary of international repercussions from
attacking the Papal States, so he didn’t fight to join Rome (or Venice) with the rest of the Kingdom. Meanwhile,
Victor Emanuele II negotiated the removal of French troops from Rome by December 1866. By December 1866,
then, all of Italy was free of foreign troops, except for Savoy and Venetia. The seat of government was moved in
1865 from Turin to Florence, where it remained until 1871, when Rome became the official capital. See Riall and
Gilmour for further information.
102
was in October 1870.81 It was re-declared the capital of Italy in July 1871. In many ways, then,
the region was defined by its singular, long-standing “provincialism.” Rome was in a state of
political uncertainty across Eliot’s long nineteenth century: between 1829 and 1832 (the
novelistic present tense) and between January 1869 (when Eliot began drafting Middlemarch)
and February 1872 (when “Old and Young” was published).82
Scholars often remind us that Middlemarch is a quintessential Victorian novel, though
it’s set from 1829 to 1832. It’s important to remember that this was a tumultuous historical
81
The Kingdom of Italy saw the Austro-Prussian War (a fight for leadership over the German states) as an
opportunity to annex Venetia from Austria. Vittorio Emanuele II allied the Kingdom of Italy with Prussia; Austria
tried to bribe Italy by offering Venice in return for non-intervention. Between April and June, Italy negotiated with
Prussia and finally declared war on Austria on the assumption that Prussia would successfully hand over Venetia at
the end of the war. By July, Prussia and Austria signed an armistice. By August, Italy surrendered, and Garibaldi
was called back from the battlefield. In spite of Italy’s failed showing, Prussia obliged Austria to cede Venetia to
Italy; however, Franz Joseph II had previously agreed to cede Venetia to Napoleon III in return for non-intervention.
Consequently, Napoleon III ceded Venetia to Italy in return for Savoy and Nice. After 1866, then, the Rome and the
remaining Papal States were the only parts of the peninsula that did not belong to the Kingdom of Italy. Between
1867 and 1871, Garibaldi tried to capture the city a number of times. Rome was finally annexed in October 1870. It
was declared the capital of the kingdom in July 1871. See Riall and Gilmour for further information.
82
While most scholars contend that Eliot was indifferent to the Risorgimento they also catalogue her ambivalent
interests in revolutionary heroes: Giuseppe Mazzini; Giuseppe Garibaldi; and Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour.
Eliot translated Risorgimento both as resuscitated and as regenerated (the first in the essay “Recollections of Italy
1860”; the second in a letter she wrote to Charles Lee Lewes from Florence, dated 31 May 1861). “George Eliot
had great admiration for Mazzini who figures in her journalism and again in her last novel,” Thompson writes;
however her “support for him was not unqualified,” since “she shared the view that Mazzini’s hopes for a general
rising in the whole of Italy were unrealistic and that lives were being lost in plots which seem to be deliberately
obstructing the progress of a liberal Piedmont.” (20). Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston note that Eliot and Lewes
saw Garibaldi at the Crystal Palace shortly before leaving for Italy in 1864; they note, in the same breath, that Eliot
“declined to contribute to a fund for” Mazzini during this period (Eliot, Journals 371). “Eliot and Lewes travelled in
Italy not as warriors for Garibaldi or artists in exile,” McCormack writes, “nor as wealthy Grand Tourists on their
Grand Tours. Instead, they went as diligent Victorians looking for culture and finding it in the Ruskinian set of
sights that made up the usual itinerary of the bourgeois intellectual, a collection of collections of art” (75). In their
preface to “Recollections of Italy 1860,” Harris and Johnston argue that this essay displays “the almost complete
suppression of reference to current affairs” we often associate with her journals and her letters. “Beyond the
comments on Cavour and the ‘widening life’ of ‘Resuscitated Italy’ at Turin,” they continue, Eliot “is silent about
the extraordinarily volatile Italian political situation in the spring of 1860, when Cavour was engaged in negotiation
with France about Piedmont's ceding Savoy and Nice in exchange for French-held duchies in central Italy. By 1861,
Cavour had become Prime Minister of an Italy united under the House of Savoy” (Eliot, Journals 331). Harris and
Johnston underline two uncharacteristically and self-consciously political moments. The first: “I feel some stirrings
of the insurrectionary spirit myself when I see the red pantaloons at every turn in the streets of Rome. I suppose
Mrs. Browning could explain to me that this is part of the great idea nourished in the soul of the modern saviour
Louis Napoleon, and that for the French to impose a hateful government on the Romans is the only proper sequence
to the story of the French Revolution” (Eliot, Letters 288). The second: “Tuscany in the highest political spirits for
the moment, and of course Victor Emanuel stares at us at every turn here, with the most loyal exaggeration of
moustache and intelligent meaning. But we are selfishly careless about dynasties just now, caring more for the
doings of Giotto and Brunelleschi, than for those of Count Cavour. On a first journey to the greatest centres of art,
one must be excused for letting one’s public spirit go to sleep a little” (294).
103
moment for England and for Italy alike, and the unrest characters experience in Middlemarch
and in Rome is grounded in real circumstances. There were two waves of proto-Risorgimento
unrest during 1820–1821 and 1830–1831, both associated with the Carbonari. The 1820
movement was motivated by hostilities against French and Austrian forces in the Kingdom of
Two Sicilies; hostilities soon extended to the north, where the Kingdom of Sardinia was granted
a constitutional monarchy in 1821. Indeed, as early as February (but through the spring and
summer of 1830), successful insurrections in the Papal Legations inspired patriots to band
together as the United Italian Provinces; these patriots chose the tricolor flag over the papal flag.
Subsequently, Pope Gregory XVI called for Austrian forces to protect the Vatican and the Papal
States and to thwart the unification of central Italy. Had Gregory XVI allowed the Papal
Legations to join the United Italian Provinces in 1831, central Italy would have been become a
single, secular nation-state nearly thirty years before it did.83
Dorothea, Casaubon, and Ladislaw visit the Vatican immediately before this tumultuous
moment. Middlemarch begins in September 1829, and these characters travel to Rome between
November and December 1829: by June 1830, King George IV was dead and by July 1830,
Gregory XVI was defending the sanctity of the Papal States from anti-French, anti-Austrian
revolutionaries. Books I–II are set from September to December 1829. In chapter 15, the
narrator reminds us that we are “now at the end of 1829,” thus contextualizing Lydgate’s practice
within medical reforms of the period (Eliot, Middlemarch 139). Eliot is even more specific in
chapter 20, when she writes that Dorothea saw “the red drapery which was being hung for
Christmas” in St. Peter’s, and it was “spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina”
(182). Since we know that the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon are in Rome for five
83
For a detailed account of the Carbonari insurrections in 1820–1821 and 1830–1831 and of the never-realized
United Italian Provinces, see Gilmour.
104
weeks, it’s likely that this chapter is set in November 1829. Lest we forget this historical
remove, the narrator frames Dorothea’s, Casaubon’s, and Ladislaw’s Roman stays in chapter 19
through the tenures of national and regional figures: “When George the Fourth was still reigning
over the privacies of Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy
was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had
taken her wedding journey to Rome. In those days the world in general was more ignorant of
good and evil by forty years than it is at present” (176). Walter Vincy may be mayor across the
plot of the novel (from the fall of 1829 to the summer of 1832), but Eliot’s references to the King
and the Prime Minister subtly date the Rome chapters: George IV died in June 1830, and the
Duke of Wellington lost a vote of no confidence in November 1830.
Yet the turn from Middlemarch to Rome at the beginning of chapter 19 is all the more
sharp, since these national and regional figureheads contextualize Italy through British dates.
When we realize Dorothea is standing in the Vatican, we are left to wonder who was Pope during
this period. 1830 was a year of major changes—or potential major changes—in England and in
Italy alike. Pius VIII had been the head of the Catholic Church for just over one year when he
forestalled the unification of the peninsula in July 1830. In fact, the Catholic Church
experienced a rapid succession of Popes between 1829 and 1830: Leo XII died in February
1829; Pius VIII was elected in March 1829 but died in November 1830; Gregory XVI was
elected in February 1831, and he was Pope until 1846, when he died, and Pius IX was elected.
The transition from Gregory XVI to Pius IX was, of course, a significant one, since many
believed Italy would witness a transition from a conservative Papacy to one that would be much
more liberal. As chapters one and three demonstrate, however, Italians’ hopes for a Catholic
Church that would support a secular nation-state were sorely disappointed; and Fuller’s and
105
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s work chronicles contemporary reactions to the 1846–1848
transition. Gregory XVI isn’t, perhaps, as infamous as Pope Pius IX in histories that trace
clashes between temporal power and burgeoning reforms and revolutions. Yet the narrator’s
silence about Roman figureheads in the Rome chapters is telling, for the references to the end of
the King’s and the Prime Minister’s terms help us read Middlemarchers in increasingly
telescopic perspective (the King’s death and the Prime Minister’s no-confidence vote prophesize
changes soon to come), but the absence of the Pope at the moment when we envision Dorothea at
the Vatican suggests just how hush-hush peninsular politics were in England, especially in
provincial England.
Still, critics often posit Rome as metaphor, as metonym, as symbol, and as
“enlargement,” not as a real place with real historical circumstances, despite the fact that we
read Middlemarch as a realist capital and despite the fact that we often read this novel as classic
Victorian realism (Hardy 1).84 For as Jerome Beaty argues, the romantic and the political plots
of the novel parallel one another. Beaty even suggests the historic date when the British
Parliament passed the First Reform Bill (7 June 1832) also marks a turning point for Eliot’s
infamously “unhistoric” heroine: “the most important fictional event of the novel,” Dorothea’s
and Ladislaw’s wedding, takes place in early June (179). Since Beaty, many new historicists
have followed suit, tracing Eliot’s devotion to novelistic historicity, especially with respect to
84
Barbara Hardy and Kathleen McCormack are among those who read Rome metaphorically, metonymically, and
symbolically. McCormack reminds us that this was a pre-Risorgimento, pre-Unification region in 1829–1832, and
she situates Eliot alongside contemporary British writers, whose “distinctly regional metaphors” depict “the
regionalism of a country that during most of the nineteenth century still lacked a common coinage, common
language, and common government” (80). McCormack is right to remind us that there wasn’t a common coinage,
common language, or common government during this period. Yet it’s crucial to remember that Italian regionalism
was sustained, in large part, by warring European nations and kingdoms (Austria, Sardinia, and France), who often
incited nascent patriotic uprisings only to destabilize one another’s hold over the peninsula. For McCormack,
however, British writers’ representations of regionalism are defined by Grand-Tourist stereotypes, not by their
sensitivity to the political realities governing the peninsula from the 1840s to the 1860s. “To some degree,”
McCormack writes, “Eliot conforms to usual nineteenth-century British patterns of devising Italian metaphors which
manifest the country’s regionalism by varying from city to city” (80).
106
political reform and revolution.85 For instance, Staten argues, “Middlemarch is located in precise
detail at a carefully realized historical conjuncture, the years 1829–31, when England, in the grip
of economic crisis, trembled on the brink of the first great Reform Act—a conjuncture
understood within the same large historical framework, the aftermath of the French Revolution
of 1789, that is for both Auerbach and Lukács the definitive milieu of the historical novel” (991).
The fact that this attentiveness to 1829–1832 infuses recent criticism is crucial to my analysis,
since our readings of 1830s England affect our readings of 1830s Italy.
While we’ve come to understand Middlemarch the town and Middlemarch the novel
through mnemonic minutiae, we’ve also come to understand the characters’ experiences in Rome
through Grand-Tourist conventions: in Middlemarch, as in The Marble Faun, characters travel
to the Eternal City to reconcile the present with a much more distant, and often overwhelming,
past. Dorothea and Casaubon don’t discover the grand narratives they’d expected to find in
Rome (for her, the spiritual and the intellectual companionship afforded by marriage; for him,
the Key to All Mythologies); however, Ladislaw confesses that this place “had given him quite a
new sense of history as a whole” (Eliot, Middlemarch 199). The reason Rome inspires in these
characters such different reactions may be that its ruins at once forestall immediate
comprehension and lay witness to its lingering and overwhelming past.86 Consequently, our
85
For discussions of 1829–1832, see especially Jerome Beaty, Cherry Wilhelm, Bert Hornback, Michael Cohen,
Edward Dramin, and Henry Staten. Like Beaty, Staten uses Dorothea’s story to trace “historical specification in
Middlemarch” (997). Staten’s reading of Dorothea and Ladislaw may be the counterpoint to Beaty’s reading of
Dorothea and Casaubon. “The chain of historical-political reference” Staten traces “is woven into the plot in the
most intricate yet economical fashion; in particular, it is the means by which Ladislaw is kept near Dorothea so that
he can see her from time to time and their romance can develop. But this is not just a ‘plot device,’ since the
substance of Ladislaw is precisely the political energy that he manifests and that, as the finale informs us, will
absorb Dorothea as a ‘wifely help’” (999).
86
Harris and Johnston argue that Eliot’s historic/historiographic sensibilities changed after her trip to Italy in 1860.
Notably, this is the year when Vittorio Emanuele II declared the United Provinces of Central Italy. “There is a
consciousness in the journal of history being constantly remade,” Harris and Johnston continue; “in her fiction,
especially from Romola on, there is an engagement with the layers of previous civilisations and with competing
histories (individual and collective)” (Eliot, Journals 334). Eliot’s “process” is, they contend, “far from being
simply archaeological on the one hand or progressivist on the other” (334).
107
interests in history are, by necessity, twofold: the characters’ present tense is the narrator’s past,
and many of the characters are overwhelmed by the stultifying nostalgia we often associate with
Grand-Tourist conventions. In turn, new historicist readings of Middlemarch require a double
suspension of disbelief, especially when we travel with the characters from England to Italy.
First, we have to remember that this novel is about the 1830s, not the 1870s, but only by way of
the narrator’s self-conscious historiographic distance. Second, we have to assume the narrator’s
historiographic distance in order to make sense of Eliot’s very different representations of
Middlemarch and of Rome at this particular moment. For if the narrator’s turn from the 1870s to
the 1830s renders Middlemarch a decidedly real, historicized place, then it also renders Rome a
much more romantic, unhistoricized place, but one that was very much in line with GrandTourists’ expectations. Yet Eliot’s representation of the Eternal City doesn’t elude nineteenthcentury historicity altogether.
For if we assume the narrator’s forty-year hindsight when we read Rome in
Middlemarch, then Eliot’s historical telescope becomes much more abbreviated: the tumultuous
period between the 1830s and the 1870s contrasts the epochs Dorothea and her two husbands
study at the Vatican. In many ways, the reforms and the revolutions both nations experienced
from 1829 to 1832 primed debates that lingered among politicoaesthetic circles from the 1830s
to the 1860s, the coming-of-age years for Eliot’s readership.87 In George Eliot and Italy:
Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the Risorgimento, Andrew Thompson
traces Eliot’s treatment of Italy in her fiction, nonfiction prose, and poetry. He is the only critic
87
Beer reminds us that the period between the 1830s and the 1870s wasn’t a meaningless one for Eliot’s readership,
since it was a collective coming-of-age period: “the darkness that Victorian readers descried in a text that tends now
to be seen as pastoral emerged from structured absences that they could fill with knowledge and conjecture: these
are the arc of 1832 to 1872 spanning the shared adulthood of George Eliot and many of her readers. They are also
the communal and personal enacted for those diverse initial readers between the publication dates of the separate
books, loading them with premonition and enquiry” (26).
108
who shows how Eliot’s Italian works are inflected by mid-nineteenth-century political realities.
Still, his reading of Rome in Middlemarch follows the new historicist arc, for he argues that this
novel primarily represents 1829–1832 Italy—and stereotypes about 1829–1832 Italy widely held
by British people. Yet he also claims that the narrator’s historical conscience is affected by what
happened later, the period between the 1840s and the 1860s: Eliot’s depictions of
Middlemarchers in Rome “reflect the historical setting of the novel in the 1820s and 1830s when
British perceptions of Italy and Italians were very different from those in the more enlightened
1850s and 1860s” (123–124). Rome appears, then, as shorthand for the characters’
politicoaesthetic worldviews. “Italian life and culture repeatedly impinge upon the quotidian
world of Middlemarch,” he writes; Dorothea and Ladislaw especially “use, or attempt to use,
aspects of Italian culture as hermeneutic devices in their readings of their fellow beings or the
world around them” (120). Middlemarch may be inflected by a mid-nineteenth-century spirit,
for this was a period when British people weren’t as afraid as they once had been of Italian
revolutionaries.88 In fact, Thompson argues, “the prejudices of English provincial life make for
misunderstanding and failure of interpretation” (124). Still, he traces “an overall progression
from Italy seen in a negative light in the first two [books] to a rather more positive and
constructive view of it in the third,” when Dorothea, Casaubon, and Ladislaw return from Rome
to Middlemarch (120). Thompson, then, focuses attention on chapters that take place in
88
For Thompson, the most explicit references to Italian revolutionaries are in chapters that take place in
Middlemarch, not in Rome. McMaster and Thompson read Eliot’s references to “white mice” as shorthand for
Italian revolutionaries in the early 1820s and the early 1830s. (Mrs. Cadwallader warns Dorothea against marrying
“an Italian carrying white mice”: Lydgate [460]). McMaster connects Eliot’s “white mice” stereotype to one that
dates back as early as 1848 in the Victorian novel: references to white mice appear in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary
Barton (1848), Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–1857), and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–
1860). “It is evident,” Thomson writes, “from the vehemence with which Dorothea refutes the association of
Ladislaw with ‘an Italian with white mice’ that she herself has a clear idea of the stereotype referred to and of just
what is meant, or implied, by labeling Ladislaw in this way. Dorothea’s question has been repeated on at least three
different occasions by critics: why an Italian and why with white mice?” (128). “Behind Mrs Cadwallader’s
remark,” Thompson continues, “with its implications of [Ladislaw’s] presumed dilettantism, need of charity, and its
remoter association with John Bull’s image of the dishonest Italian, there may also lie the suggestion that Will is to
be pitied for the ill-treatment he has received from Casaubon and from Middlemarch” (130).
109
Middlemarch, not in Rome, and he implies that this place alters their impressions of
contemporary Italian people.89
Yet we should read Eliot’s representations of Rome in Rome and through pre- and postRisorgimento lenses for several reasons. Dorothea and Ladislaw experience a heightened sense
of immediacy in the Eternal City, especially in the Vatican, and the heightened sense of
immediacy they associate with Italy would have resonated uncannily with contemporary readers
in 1871–1872. Indeed, while many date the 1860s as the apex for the Risorgimento and the
Unification of Italy, the turning point for Rome didn’t happen until 1870, when the Italian Army
defeated the Papal Army just outside the old city walls. News of Rome’s annexation, and
subsequent standoffs between the Italian and the Papal Armies, captivated British journalists just
before Eliot drafted and published the first volumes of Middlemarch.90 There are striking
89
While Thompson traces Eliot’s subtle allusions to Italian, Austrian, and French politics in a poem she drafted in
1869 (“When Lisa Loved the King”), he argues that this novel is nearly silent on the subject of Unification; he
doesn’t, however, read Middlemarch as a post-Risorgimento, post-Unification novel, despite the fact that it was
drafted and published immediately in the wake of Rome’s annexation. For Thompson, the Risorgimento proper is
absent from Middlemarch, since it ends in 1832, long before the First, the Second, or the Third Wars of
Independence, and long before Rome became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Indeed, he argues if there is a
nationalist spirit in the novel, then it appears as a series of proto-nationalist allusions to Dante. It’s not surprising,
then, that critics who’ve read Middlemarch as a novel about England and about Italy often highlight Eliot’s
quotations, misquotations, and revisions of Dante Alighieri. Joel Brattin, Joseph Weisenfarth, and Andrew
Thompson variously argue that the revival of Dante across the nineteenth century is crucial to our understanding of
Eliot’s Italophilia: Dante, even veiled allusions to Dante, they argue, should be read as shorthand for a longstanding
mythology of culturally unified Italy. Most of these discussions emphasize Eliot’s use of Dante’s Purgatorio in the
epigraphs to chapters 7 and 9; these epigraphs serve as narrative clues the rest of the plot of Middlemarch.
Thompson, in fact, devotes an entire chapter to Dante in the novels of George Eliot. He argues that “Eliot drew
upon the various Dantes constructed by the nineteenth century and created her own Dante in her work” (29). Dante,
of course, never espoused republican sentiment; however, by the 1830s and certainly by the 1870s, he came to
represent a proto-Risorgimento spirit, and in his afterlife he was rendered the singular voice of a nineteenth-century
nation-state. While Dante may be a proto-Risorgimento specter, for many readers, there are much more undeviating
ways to put Dorothea, Casaubon, and Ladislaw in conversation with the Italian Question that remained unanswered
long after the plot of the novel, especially since these characters travel to Rome—not to Florence—to reckon their
historical and their historiographical sensibilities.
90
As we’ll see in chapter three, British journalists distanced themselves from nascent Italian patriotism between the
1830s and the 1850s, though many became much more empathetic during the 1860s, once the peninsula was, for the
most part, under Vittorio Emanuele’s rule. The reasons are twofold: first, many feared that this revolutionary spirit
would lead to political instability in Great Britain; second, the British government was allied with anti-republican
forces (different nations/empires at different times). By the 1860s, however, the tides turned for many in Great
Britain, and the anti-republican sentiment that characterized the first half of the nineteenth century was reversed.
“Support for the cause of Italian unification was never stronger than in the 1860s,” Thompson reminds us;
110
parallels between Rome’s unfolding history and the composition and publication of
Middlemarch from 1869 to 1872. Eliot’s journal entry for New Year’s Day 1869 reads: “I have
set myself many tasks for the year—I wonder how many will be accomplished? A Novel called
Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and several minor poems” (134). She confesses to
herself that she was disappointed in her progress on Middlemarch during the summer and the fall
of 1869.91 Her letters from this period reveal that she was overwhelmed by personal and
political crises: the deaths of George Henry Lewes’s son Thornton Lewes and mother Elizabeth
Ashweek in October 1869 and in December 1870, respectively;92 and the Franco-Prussian War,93
which she discussed at length in her correspondence between July 1870 and May 1871.
Surely, Eliot’s personal and political preoccupations inflected the attitude she had about
her own work during this period: her sustained interest in the Franco-Prussian War must have
affected the ways she imagined Rome between 1870 and 1872. The fall of Napoleon III on 2
September 1870 forced French troops to withdraw from Rome; by 20 September 1870 the Italian
“Garibaldi, by now a hero of mythical proportions, had been given a rapturous welcome in England in 1864.
Economic links between Piedmont and Britain were increasing and interest in the cause of Italian unity was
strengthened by newspaper commentaries, letters, articles and poems in magazines like Blackwood’s” (123).
91
On 2 August 1869, Eliot writes that she began her novel, “(The Vincy and Featherstone Parts)” (Journals 137).
“Thornie is much better,” Eliot writes on 29 August, “but is still not able to walk. At p. 40 of Middlemarch” (137).
“I meditated characters and conditions for Middlemarch,” she writes on 1 September, “which stands still in the
beginning of Chapter III” (137). By 11 September, Eliot seems almost to have lost faith in her novel: “I do not feel
very confident that I can make anything satisfactory of Middlemarch. I have need to remember that other things
which have been accomplished by me, were begun under the same cloud. G. has been reading Romola again, and
expresses profound admiration. This is encouraging. At p. 50—end of Chapter III” (138).
92
For references to Thornton Lewes’s illness and death, see Eliot’s journal entries for 8 May 1869, 1 August 1869,
5 August 1869, 8 August 1869, 19 August 1869, 29 August 1869, 13 October 1869, and 19 October 1869. For
Elizabeth Ashweek’s death, see 10 December 1870.
93
For references to the Franco-Prussian War, see Eliot’s letters to Mrs. Richard Congreve, 2 December 1870; to
Mme. Louis Belloc, 20 December 1870; to Sara Sophia Hennell, 2 January 1871; to Edward Bruce Hamley, 24
January 1871; to François D’Albert-Durade, 27 January 1871; to François D’Albert-Durade, 25 April 1871; and her
journal entry on 31 December 1870. Having read a newspaper article about the war on 31 December 1870, she asks
herself: “Am I doing anything that will add the weight of a sandgrain against the persistence of such evil” (Journals
141). Indeed, the newspaper article seems to have haunted her, and on 2 January 1871, she writes to Sara Sophia
Hennell: “No people can carry on a long fierce war without being brutalized by it, more or less, and it pains me that
the educated voices have not a higher moral tone about national and international duties and prospects. But, like
every one else, I feel that the war is too much with me, and am rather anxious to avoid unwise speech about it than
to utter what may seem to me to be wisdom. The pain is that one can do so little!” (Letters 132).
111
Army defeated the Papal Army, and Vittorio Emanuele II annexed Rome to the United Kingdom
of Italy.94 Eliot’s frustration with Middlemarch reached its fever pitch at exactly this moment:
in September 1870, she set aside her Rosamond Vincy/Peter Featherstone narrative; in
November 1870, she began her Dorothea Brooke narrative. It’s clear that Eliot saw “Miss
Brooke” as a standalone project (from Middlemarch) when she was first drafting it, possibly
because it is about Dorothea’s transformation from Miss Brooke to Mrs. Casaubon, and because
it is about Italy, not about central England. “I am experimenting in a story,” Eliot writes on 2
December 1870, “which I began without any very serious intention of carrying it out lengthily.
It is a subject which has been recorded among my possible themes ever since I began to write
fiction, but will probably take new shapes in the development. I am today at p. 44” (Journals
141). On New Year’s Eve 1870, Eliot writes that she’s finished “only 100 pages—good printed
pages—of a story which I began about the opening of November, and at present mean to call
‘Miss Brooke’. Poetry halts just now. In my private lot I am unspeakably happy, loving and
beloved. But I am doing little for others” (142). By 19 March 1871, however, Eliot had merged
“Miss Brooke” with Middlemarch: “It is grievous to me how little, from one cause or other,
chiefly languor and occasionally positive ailments, I manage to get done. I have written about
236 pages (print) of my Novel, which I want to get off my hands by next November. My present
fear is that I have too much matter, too many ‘momente’” (142).95
94
In a letter Eliot wrote to Mrs. Richard Congreve on 2 December 1870, she compares her relative peace to the
horrors of the Franco-Prussian War. Eliot’s letter shows how she was thinking about the wide-ranging effects of the
Franco-Prussian War on southern Europe, for she also compares her fortitude to that of “the old Romans, when they
thanked their general for not despairing of the Republic” (Letters 125). Eliot’s reference is to “old Romans,” not to
new, but her letter reveals that she connects recent clashes between the Italian Army and the Papal Army—and,
ultimately, the annexation of Rome—to the Franco-Prussian War. Eliot wrote this letter on the very day when she
first mentions “Miss Brooke” in her journal.
95
Eliot’s critics have described Middlemarch in similar terms. In his review of the novel, Henry James writes,
“‘Middlemarch’ is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole” (958). Thompson argues that Italy
“remains essentially alien and unassimilated, a composite of fragments, second-hand knowledge, opinions and
prejudices” in this novel (131).
112
While Eliot’s fear that this novel covers “too much matter, too many ‘momente’” may be
read as a self-conscious critique of her decision to merge Rosamond’s story with Dorothea’s, it
may also be read as a serious meditation on the project she envisioned. No moment
encompasses the fine balance between a “squirrel’s heart beat” and a collection of classical
sculptures (acquired, lost, and then re-acquired by the Catholic Church over the centuries) more
explicitly than when we first see Dorothea in the Vatican (182). Having reminded us of the
characters’ present-tense context (the King’s imminent death and the Prime Minister’s imminent
no-confidence vote), the narrator immediately turns to a description of the Vatican and outlines
the differences between travellers in 1829 and travellers in 1872. “Travellers did not often carry
full information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets,” Eliot writes; “and even
the most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed tomb of the ascended
Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter’s fancy” (Eliot, Middlemarch 176). Of course,
between 1829 and 1872, Grand Tourists were supplanted by middle-class travellers, who often
depended on their Baedekers (since 1832), their Murrays (since 1836), and their latest Ruskin to
teach them what and how to appreciate Italian landmarks. Indeed, as Weisenfarth argues, “Eliot
opens chapter 19 by reminding the reader that the 1870s know more about the language of art
than the 1820s did” (371). Since these guidebooks weren’t yet in print when Dorothea travels to
Rome in November 1829, the Vatican would have been a disorienting place. That the narrator
scoffs at the Grand Tourist who mistakes a tomb for a vase suggests the Vatican was
overwhelming, even for a well-heeled man, and it often inspired grave misinterpretations.96
96
“Writing in retrospect,” Harris and Johnston write, Eliot “constructs her Italian journey as a version of the Grand
Tour inflected by English Romanticism. Her account acknowledges the class (aristocratic) and gender (male)
implications of the Grand Tour” (Journals 329). Throughout “Recollections of Italy 1860”, they continue, “there is
appraisal of the experiences of the travellers against a set of romantic expectations of the classical world, for the
most part tacit, which [Eliot] finds fulfilled without either reaching heights of romantic epiphany, or confronting
Italy as a mystic Other, symbol of the sensuous South” (329).
113
In fact, Eliot confesses that this museum is impossible to navigate, precisely because it is
organized achronologically. For while the museum presents a history, it is the history of the
Catholic Church’s acquisitions of artwork, arranged from Pope to Pope, not from epoch to
epoch. This isn’t a museum where travellers could witness the unfolding of art history—
linearly—from Greek sculptures and Roman copies of Greek sculptures to neoclassical paintings.
In her “Recollections of Italy 1860,” Eliot writes: “Even the mere hurrying along the vast halls
with the fitful torchlight falling on the innumerable statues and busts and bas-reliefs and
sarcophagi, would have left a sense of awe at these crowded silent forms which have the
solemnity of suddenly arrested life” (Journals 344). “Wonderfully grand these halls of the
Vatican are, and there is but one complaint to be made against the home provided for this richest
collection of antiquities,” she continues: “there is no historical arrangement of them and no
catalogue. The system of classification is based on the history of their collection by the different
Popes, so that for every other purpose but that of securing to each Pope his share of glory, it is a
system of helter-skelter” (344). Yet just because Eliot herself saw the Vatican as “a system of
helter-skelter” doesn’t mean she wasn’t also interested in it as an on-going—and compelling—
historiographical construction.
Still, like Hawthorne’s critics, Eliot’s critics often argue that Italy appears (in her fiction
and in her nonfiction prose) as a museum or as a collection of art, not as a real place populated
with nineteenth-century people.97 Because of this unfair assumption, critics also often dismiss
her representation of the Vatican in chapters 19–22 of Middlemarch as historical misreading or
97
Eliot critics often argue that Eliot’s museumized conception of Italy extends from her “Recollections” to Romola
(1862–1863) and to Middlemarch and to Daniel Deronda (1876); and they often suggest this museumized
conception of Italy remains static across her canon. Still, McCormack distinguishes the Italy we see in Romola and
in Middlemarch from the one we see in Daniel Deronda. Eliot’s “travel journals catalogue the contents of a series
of museums, galleries, libraries, ruins, and cathedrals. Her novels present Italy as seen by British travellers: the
Cheverels, the Casaubons, the Grandcourts. Only in Romola does Eliot people her Italian settings with characters
who are not British tourists” (76).
114
misunderstanding and as an annoyance, not as a serious meditation on temporality. Indeed, as
early as 1885, Lord Acton writes,
The Italian journey reveals that weakness of the historic faculty which is a
pervading element in her life…Italy was little more to her than a vast museum,
and Rome, with all the monuments and institutions which link the old world with
the new, interested her less than the galleries of Florence. She surveys the grand
array of tombs in St Peter’s, and remarks nothing but some peasants feeling the
teeth of Canova’s lion. (qtd. in Journals 328)
Since then, McCormack and Thompson have followed suit. Eliot “most clearly embodies her
perception of Italy as a collection of collections in Middlemarch,” and the Vatican is the
collection of collections for Casaubon, since it unites otherwise disparate ways of knowing:
intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic (McCormack 75–76).98
The problem, McCormack intimates, is that this museumized, historicized knowledge
isn’t accessible to Dorothea, while it is accessible to Casaubon: she hasn’t had her husband’s
gentlemanly education. When Casaubon travels with Dorothea to Rome in November 1829, he
has already seen the Vatican and the rest of the Eternal City, since he has already had a Grand
Tour. In chapter 20, Casaubon tells Dorothea, “‘I well remember that I considered it an epoch in
my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall of Napoleon, an event which opened the
Continent to travellers. Indeed I think it is one among several cities to which an extreme
hyperbole has been applied—‘See Rome and die’: but in your case I would propose an
emendation and say, ‘See Rome as a bride, and live thenceforth as a happy wife’” (Eliot,
98
“In the same way that Dorothea desires to take part in Casaubon’s project of reading all past cultures so as to
produce a ‘Key to all Mythologies,’” Thompson writes, “she is equally desirous of undertaking the mental
reconstruction of the city she sees around her. She finds instead that she lacks any ‘key’, any ‘binding theory’ which
will ‘unite all contrasts’, and becomes painfully aware of the inadequacy of ‘her small allowance of knowledge’ so
that ‘the weight of unintelligible Rome’ lies heavily on her” (124).
115
Middlemarch 186–187). What has the potential to be a parallel moment (Casaubon confiding in
Dorothea about his own first trip to Rome) is only the pretense of intimacy. For by revising the
aphorism from “See Rome and die” to “See Rome as a bride, and live thenceforth as a happy
wife,” Casaubon belittles Dorothea and shows how he distinguishes his experiences as a young
and old man from hers as a woman. From Casaubon’s perspective, Dorothea’s appreciation of
the city is circumscribed by her identity as a woman: his happy (or unhappy) wife will never be
a Grand Tourist because she will never be a gentleman.99
By suggesting that Dorothea’s misreadings, misunderstandings, and “bad education”
render the Vatican “‘unintelligible’” to Dorothea, McCormack extends Lord Acton’s supposition
about Eliot: she couldn’t develop an appreciation for historicized meanings in Italy, particularly
in Rome, because she was a woman, and a woman couldn’t have had her husband’s Grand-Tour
education (77). Because McCormack assumes that Eliot’s distaste for the Vatican is the same as
Dorothea’s (perhaps because Dorothea, like Eliot, was a woman), she also assumes that this
representation of the Vatican ought to be read as a corrective. Eliot, McCormack contends,
“wanted her museums structured like narratives with a chronological order that demonstrated
progress” (76–77). Yet the narrator’s nods to the distance between 1829 and 1872 and to
anachronisms associated with Dorothea—and with the sculptures Dorothea studies—should be
understood as a narrative dramatization of Vatican epistemology.
For if, as McCormack argues, the Vatican represents a “compressed historical telescope,”
then it’s Dorothea, not Casaubon, who tries to envisage it beyond the Grand Tour and beyond the
99
Of course, Casaubon’s damning “emendation” is a double irony: he dies soon after seeing Rome a second time,
and she is a happy wife, a second time, to Ladislaw. Many critics map Eliot’s descriptions of artworks and
collections in the Rome chapters onto Dorothea’s relationships with Casaubon and with Ladislaw. Dorothea’s tours
(or non-tours) with Casaubon suggest his impotence, while the artworks and the collections associated with
Ladislaw suggest his vitality and virility. For readings of artworks and collections in the Vatican as allegories for
Dorothea’s romantic relationships, see McCormack, Thompson, Chase, Trotter, and Brattin.
116
Key to All Mythologies, as something much more idiosyncratic (77). In fact, Dorothea (unlike
Casaubon) struggles to reckon her immediate moment against firsthand experiences and against
guidebooks she couldn’t have had at this particular moment, and she is undoubtedly
overwhelmed by the hallways full of storied art surrounding her. I argue, then, in
contradistinction to McCormack, that Eliot’s interest in the Vatican’s “helter-skelter”
periodization informs the narrator’s treatment of temporality across Middlemarch, especially in
chapters 19–22, since these chapters elude a moment-by-moment, decade-by-decade,
chronology. Indeed, chapter 19 pointedly disorients us, just as it does Dorothea, since it is told
out-of-order, something we don’t perhaps realize until we’ve finished reading chapter 20,
Dorothea’s meditation on her honeymoon.100
Eliot only unveils a newly wed Dorothea at the beginning of chapter 19 after dilating on
the King, the Prime Minister, the Mayor of Middlemarch, and the travellers who populate the
Vatican just before Christmas 1829. Our vision of Dorothea remains distant throughout the
chapter, since the narrator filters her personal impressions of St. Peter’s primarily through
Ladislaw’s and Naumann’s perspectives. Indeed, we see Ladislaw and Naumann before we see
Dorothea, and when we see them, they are studying a person we don’t yet recognize. Naumann
approaches Ladislaw and says “‘Come here, quick! else she will have changed her pose’” (176–
177). Because Ladislaw faces away from Naumann and Dorothea, and stands with “his back
turned on the Belvedere Torso,” he doesn’t immediately recognize her (176). Tellingly, the
narrator doesn’t sharpen Ladislaw’s out-of-focus vision. Consequently, Dorothea also appears to
us as a statue, the Ariadne then called the Cleopatra, when we first see her in the Vatican.
100
It only becomes clear that chapter 19 follows chapter 20 chronologically at the end of this chapter, once the
narrator has outlined what transpired between Dorothea and Casaubon immediately before Naumann and Ladislaw
see her: “she drove with Mr. Casaubon to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of inscriptions,
and when she parted with him at the entrance to the library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as
to what was around her” (190).
117
“Quickness was ready at the call,” Eliot writes, “and the two figures passed lightly along by the
Meleager towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne, then called the Cleopatra, lies in the
marble voluptuousness of her beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and
tenderness” (177). It’s hard, here, to distinguish between the Ariadne/the Cleopatra and
Dorothea at the moment when Ladislaw and Naumann approach her:
They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal near the
reclining marble: a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not shamed by the
Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck,
was thrown backward from her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed
her cheek, pushing somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a
sort of halo to her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair. (177)
While the “breathing blooming girl” remains anonymous, we know who she will be. It’s
interesting that this moment of not-yet recognition directly follows the narrator’s aside about
“the brilliant English critic” who confuses a tomb for a vase. The moment is full of
melodramatic anticipation: we see Dorothea encounter her second husband, not her first, in this
initial portrait of her honeymoon. The moment may even be a tongue-in-cheek gesture toward
Ladislaw’s naïveté. For if we are to read Ladislaw’s delayed recognition as a parallel to “the
brilliant English critic’s” mistaking a tomb for a vase, then his vision of Dorothea-asAriadne/Cleopatra must be equally flawed.
Still, Eliot’s critics often discuss Naumann’s and Ladislaw’s statuesque vision of
Dorothea in unequivocally serious terms. To be sure, Naumann and Ladislaw do render her
body a “pose” and her dress the “drapery” that enfolds it (177). Moreover, Ladislaw and
Naumann are drawn to her stillness, but her stillness also makes them sensitive to her
118
“quickness” (177). Even if they compare her stillness and her quickness to a statue’s, they don’t
really see Dorothea as a tableau vivant, since they’re worried they won’t catch a glimpse of her
before she moves. Their conversation should be read, then, as clever (if naïve) repartee, not just
as self-conscious observations that reduce Dorothea to an objet d’art (177). For as much as this
is a passage that intimates Dorothea’s displacement and isolation in the Vatican, it is also a
meditation on Naumann’s and Ladislaw’s often self-circling aestheticizations. In fact, Abigail
Rischin argues that the narrator’s description of Dorothea extends Naumann’s and Ladislaw’s
aestheticizing perspectives: “Using the word ‘form’ in reference to Dorothea’s body and
‘drapery’ to designate her dress, the narrator describes Dorothea as if she were a work of art
while insisting on her presence as a ‘breathing blooming girl’—a ‘figure’ who ‘stand[s] against’
rather than on ‘a pedestal’” (1124). Dorothea, then, appears “as part of a striking, if fleeting,
tableau” (1125).101
Kate Flint contends that this tableau conceit extends to the rest of the novel, where
Dorothea continues to be understood as a marble figure physically but also intellectually and
spiritually. She writes,
If, on occasion, the live body freezes into ornamental statuary—after Dorothea
hears that Casaubon has a potentially fatal condition, she “sat as if she had been
turned to marble” (ch. 30, 271); after Casaubon’s death, Dorothea and Will sit
helplessly when it seems that Will must leave town, and it “seemed to him as if
they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other’s presence”
(ch. 54, 511)—we are nonetheless continually prompted to recognize that even
the apparently inanimate conceals the pulsating, and inseparable, demands of
101
For readings of the statues Ladislaw, Naumann, and the narrator associate with Dorothea, and of the ways she
becomes statuesque herself, see also McCormack, Chase, Flint, Auerbach, and Coates.
119
body and mind. […] Lest we should miss the point, the naturalist clergyman
Farebrother later reminds Dorothea (as he makes her contemplate the
uncomfortable possibility that Lydgate may not be the man she has taken him to
be) that “‘character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable.
It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do’”
(ch. 72, 692). (75)
Dorothea’s statuary identity extends beyond Ladislaw’s, Naumann’s, Farebrother’s, and the
narrator’s rhetorical figurations.102 Indeed, these rhetorical figurations affect the ways we read
and understand her character across the plot of the novel. Many critics dislike Dorothea for her
idealism, or seeming idealism, and they complain that her unchanging perfection undermines
Eliot’s study of flawed individuals. F.R. Leavis may be the most famous among these critics, but
Nina Auerbach is the most pointed. Auerbach calls Dorothea a “saintly, statuesque heroine,” and
she confesses that this statuesqueness makes her “flesh creep” (87).
Dorothea’s physical fixedness informs her intellectual and her spiritual identities. We
witness this transformation from tableau vivant to memorialization, monumentalization, or even
stony apotheosis across the rest of the novel. When Dorothea is transfigured—in this moment
and again and again throughout the novel—from person to statue, she becomes a paradox,
because her statuesqueness renders her both still and quick, both breathing and blooming, but
also prematurely elegized. We’ve come to read Dorothea as the woman described by Fuller’s
letter-writer: “She looked upon herself as a living statue,” he asserts, “which would always stand
102
Karen Chase similarly argues Eliot frequently “‘throws into relief’ a particular trait she wants to emphasize by
way of the surrounding contrast. Dorothea’s beauty is ‘thrown into relief by poor dress’ (ch. 1, 7); the autumnal day
of Dorothea’s first visit to Lowick prompts the narrator to remark that her fiancé ‘had no bloom that could be thrown
into relief by that background’ (ch. 9, 60) or by the contrast with Dorothea’s frequently remarked bloom. In the
Vatican, the German artist Naumann admires the ‘fine bit of antithesis’ exhibited by the Quaker-clad Dorothea
leaning against the ‘sensuous perfection’ of the marble Cleopatra (Ariadne) (ch. 19, 155), each throwing the other
into relief, and suggesting the possibility of commerce rather than contrast in the assessment ‘sensuous force
controlled by spiritual passion’ (ch. 19, 156)” (8).
120
on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have
been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they
did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her” (qtd. in Fuller, Memoirs
of Margaret Fuller Ossoli 238). Like Fuller, Dorothea isn’t as self-righteous as her critics claim,
and her statuesqueness isn’t self-imposed.
Even middlebrow discussions of Middlemarch rely on this narrative/metanarrative
conceit. In his Into the Canon series for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates muses, “George Eliot’s
prose has a kind of physicality, and making my way [through] Middlemarch feels more like
studying a sculpture than actually reading a book. There’s a narrative here, but it’s almost beside
the point. (At least so far.)” It’s no accident that Coates turns from this formulation (novel-assculpture) to the moment when Dorothea leaves the Vatican—which is also the moment when
the narrator shifts from Ladislaw’s and Naumann’s perspectives to hers. Coates suggests that
this statuesque novel may be understood, then, as a “kind of philosophical tract written with
conventions of fiction.” What Coates says parenthetically about statuesqueness and plotlessness
in Middlemarch encompasses many of the points I make about Fuller and Hawthorne in chapter
one and about Henry James in chapter six. For when real or fictional people are rendered
statuesque—as Fuller is in the memoir composed by William Henry Channing, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and James Freeman Clarke; and as Donatello and Dorothea are in The Marble Faun
and in Middlemarch respectively—it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate their
narrative trajectories at first glance. When Fuller, Donatello, and Dorothea turn from flesh to
marble, “the intervals between two breaths” elude us (Hawthorne, The Marble Faun 16). To
reverse Eliot’s formulation, then, the problem with Dorothea’s statuesqueness isn’t that it
represents too many “momente,” but too few.
121
Coates’s argument about plotlessness is all the more interesting in light of recent critical
discussions concerning the Ariadne “then called the Cleopatra” (177). Just as the narrator’s
references to the King and the Prime Minister displace Eliot’s readers from 1872 to 1829, the
claim that this statue had been mistakenly called the Cleopatra, not the Ariadne, reminds us of
our double remove from Dorothea’s present tense. The Sleeping Ariadne-Cleopatra distances us
from the plot of the novel proper, since it underscores the contextual histories inscribed in Eliot’s
narrative logic (mentioned, elliptically and self-consciously, by her narrator) and in the twofold
paratexts attending this statue: Ariadne’s and Cleopatra’s.103 Rischin argues that this statue
“serves a proleptic function in the novel” and may be understood, “in the words of Kenneth
Gross, ‘as resonant synecdoche for sculpture in general’” (1127, 1126). “At the same time,”
Rischin continues, the Sleeping Ariadne “is meant to call to mind a temporal sequence” (1126).
Sleep intimates that this figure’s “natural condition is stasis”; and yet it also “represents a
pregnant moment: an instance of climax or crisis” for a person with a predetermined, but
unnarrated, past and future (1126). Eliot’s Sleeping Ariadne-Cleopatra is, then, an extension of
Hawthorne’s The Dying Gladiator: for Naumann and Ladislaw and for Miriam and Kenyon,
these works dramatize sculptural epistemology. The Dying Gladiator, like the Sleeping AriadneCleopatra, represents one stalled moment that intimates the rest of the plot and reconciles the
103
For discussions of the Ariadne-Cleopatra paratexts, see French, Wiesenfarth, Rischin, and Miller. Rischin’s
analysis of the parallels between the Ariadne-Theseus-Dionysus relationships and the Dorothea-Casaubon-Ladislaw
relationships is particularly helpful: “Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos of Crete, gave Theseus, whom she loved,
the clew of thread that enabled him to escape from the labyrinth after he slew the Minotaur. Leaving her native
Crete behind, she then travelled with Theseus to Naxos, where he cruelly abandoned her. [Dionysus] discovered the
abandoned princess and fell in love with her. As Ariadne was lamenting her plight, he came to her rescue. She was
consoled by him, and they were soon married” (1126). Rischin suggests that the Sleeping Ariadne materializes the
failures of the Casaubon honeymoon, since it portrays Ariadne in the moment when Theseus abandons her. For
Rischin, the (mis-named) Cleopatra is significant primarily because she embodies Dorothea’s latent sexuality,
which she ultimately expresses for Ladislaw, not for Casaubon. The Sleeping Ariadne-Cleopatra’s twofold identity
extends the theme of misreading, misunderstanding, and self-conscious anachronisms.
122
suspended present-tense with a not-so-immediate past and future.104 Because hypnogogic states
are crucial turning points for Cleopatra’s, for Ariadne’s, and for the Gladiator’s stories,
sculptural renderings of a suspended present tense hold exaggerated narrative and metanarrative
(or representational) meanings. For the narrator of Middlemarch, however, who sees the statue
as Cleopatra, as Ariadne, and, most importantly, as a prescient sculptural twin to Dorothea, the
singular moment isn’t just suspended: it recurs each time we associate or re-associate the figure
with one of these women. Ultimately, Cleopatra’s, Ariadne’s, and Dorothea’s otherwise nonsimultaneous narratives coalesce, perhaps only because of their simultaneous stillness in the
Vatican; and the triumvirate appears, perhaps counter-intuitively, as one echoic figure.
For as Wiesenfarth argues, chapter 19 “suggests Eliot’s own rich knowledge of
iconography” and “employs a language of art drawing on classical mythology as the subtext of a
series of realistic events” dramatized across the rest of the novel (371–372). Rischin, in fact,
contends that the “double identity” of this statue requires us to contextualize Dorothea’s
relationships with Casaubon and with Ladislaw, since the narrator envisions her to be
Cleopatra’s and Ariadne’s present-tense mythological inheritor (1122). To follow this logic: if
Dorothea is Ariadne-Cleopatra, then Casaubon is Theseus-Octavius, and Ladislaw is Dionysus-
104
The more obvious parallel to the Sleeping Ariadne-Cleopatra in Eliot’s novel is a Cleopatra in Hawthorne’s. In
The Marble Faun, Kenyon’s piece d’resistance is a Cleopatra. Hawthorne modelled Kenyon’s statue on William
Wetmore Story’s (and notes the parallels between Kenyon and Story in his “Preface”), and Story modelled his
Cleopatra and his Libyan Sibyl on Sojourner Truth. Hawthorne describes the statue in the chapter entitled
“Cleopatra”: “A marvellous repose—that rare merit in statuary, except it be the lumpish repose native to the block
of stone—was diffused throughout the figure. The spectator felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever and
turmoil of her life, and, for one instant—as it were, between two pulse-throbs—had relinquished all activity, and
was resting throughout every vein and muscle. It was the repose of despair, indeed; for Octavius had seen her, and
remained insensible to her enchantments. But still there was a great, smouldering furnace, deep down in the
woman’s heart. The repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to stir hand or foot again; and yet, such
was the creature’s latent energy and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath
that you were now drawing, midway in your throat” (126). “The expression was of profound, gloomy, heavily
resolving thought,” Hawthorne continues; “a glance into her past life and present emergencies, while her spirit
gathered itself up for some new struggle, or was getting sternly reconciled to impending doom. In one view, there
was a certain softness and tenderness, how breathed into the statue, among so many strong and passionate elements,
it is impossible to say” (126–127).
123
Mark Antony. Many critics have followed Rischin’s lead, studying the romantic triangle
between Dorothea, Casaubon, and Ladislaw through the statue’s doubled history; and they often
suggest that Dorothea’s otherwise unnarrated erotic potential (as Miss Brooke or as Mrs.
Casaubon) is materialized in this marble figure. Yet Rischin reminds us that by 1829, and
certainly by 1872, calling the Sleeping Ariadne a Cleopatra was an anachronism most people
would have recognized.105 Like Naumann, Ladislaw, and the “brilliant English critic,” then, the
narrator remembers the Vatican in terms of misreadings, misunderstandings, or over-corrections.
Yet Dorothea isn’t studying the statue; Naumann, Ladislaw, and the narrator are, and
their glances invite us to compare Dorothea to Cleopatra or to Ariadne—or to both. In fact, the
narrator suggests that Dorothea is preoccupied with something immaterial: “She was not looking
at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were fixed dreamily on a streak of
sunlight which fell across the floor” (177). Still, Eliot continues, “she became conscious of the
two strangers who suddenly paused as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at
them, immediately turned away to join a maid-servant and courier who were loitering along the
hall at a little distance off” (177).106 It’s tempting to follow Naumann’s and Ladislaw’s line of
vision: to define Dorothea through Cleopatra’s and Ariadne’s eternally suspended present tenses
105
When “Old and Young” was first published in February 1872, Eliot’s “readers would have been aware of the
statue’s shift in identification and would thus have been in a position to interpret its significance both as an Ariadne
and as a Cleopatra.” (Rischin 1126). “Moreover,” Rischin continues, “a host of new representations of the statue,
one of the most admired in the Vatican collection, made it widely accessible to the late-nineteenth-century public:
etchings in well-known guides to European art, woodcuts and line drawings in popular handbooks for travelers,
modestly priced photographs, and magnificently intricate engravings” (1122). Dorothea’s twofold identity as
Cleopatra and as Ariadne would have been further complicated, since nineteenth-century histories of Cleopatra’s life
and of Ariadne’s life weren’t always consistent. Dorothea’s statuesque identities are redoubled, then, by narrative
variations that unfolded between the first century BC and the nineteenth.
106
The narrator retraces this moment, much more inwardly, in chapter 19 in chapter 20: “After they had examined
the figure, and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann
had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which
made her pose remarkable. She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues:
she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedgebordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear
to her as it had been” (190). Even at this moment, when Dorothea is standing in the heart of the Vatican, she is
thinking of her home: Middlemarch.
124
but also through their pasts and their futures. Yet Dorothea experiences an anxiousness before
this statue that reveals a stark difference between flesh and marble. Her “immediate” reflex (she
turns away from Ladislaw almost as soon as he recognizes her) interrupts his dreamy outward
gaze (he turns away from the window when Naumann taps him on the shoulder); but it also
forces us to contend with her dreamy inward-looking eyes, which suggest a present tense
inaccessible to us, even in the Ariadne-Cleopatra archetype.
Dorothea’s averted eyes are as important as the Ariadne and the Cleopatra paratexts. By
focusing attention on Dorothea’s subtle visceral reaction to Ladislaw, the narrator shows how she
is much more sensitive to the people who “immediately” surround her than she is to a marble
woman (whose pasts and futures parallel hers, but only for readers who’ve already finished the
novel). Tellingly, the narrator associates Dorothea with the words quick and quickness several
times throughout chapters 19–20; these words highlight her anxiousness and her selfconsciousness about present-tense details. When we see Dorothea standing in the Vatican, she is
defined by her fleetingness. While we might imagine she is struggling to reconcile her private
crisis (the future of her marriage) with the Ariadnes and the Cleopatras who surround her (and
embody pasts she didn’t personally experience), we aren’t privy to her innermost mind until
chapter 20. Still, critics who address Dorothea’s “quickness” often assume that her anxiousness
and her self-consciousness overwhelm her, so much so that she becomes paralyzed and cannot
reconcile her past, present, and future tenses. “Characteristically,” Thompson writes,
“Dorothea’s chief concern is with the ‘quick,’ the here and now, and her comment merely
underlines her inability to bridge the gap between the splendid past and the sordid present” (124–
125). Thompson contends that Dorothea “remains confused and disoriented by the spectacle of
Rome,” and “she is unable to embark upon her journey though this alien world” without her
125
husband (125).107 Unlike Casaubon, who returns to the Vatican libraries day in and day out
while preparing his Key to All Mythologies, Dorothea “has no access to [teleological]
knowledge,” and she isn’t interested in tracing a grand narrative (125). Dorothea’s “quickness”
is one of her defining features. Yet Thompson’s suggestion that this “quickness” obscures
Dorothea’s ability to trace historical continuities isn’t really fair. The narrator is removed from
Dorothea’s consciousness in chapter 19 and can only speculate what she may (or may not) be
thinking in the face of the Ariadne-Cleopatra and the Vatican much more generally. The narrator
finally reveals what prompts Dorothea’s standstill in chapter 20. It’s not that Dorothea doesn’t
understand the teleological, the mythological, the monumental, or the here and now. It’s that the
narrator superimposes these histories upon her from a distance.
Naumann’s response to Dorothea shows how he sees her stillness and then her quickness
in juxtaposition with the Ariadne-Cleopatra. When Naumann sees Dorothea leave, he asks
Ladislaw: “‘What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?’” (177). Naumann continues
to pontificate, “searching in his friend’s face for responding admiration, but going on volubly
without waiting for any other answer” (177). “‘There lies antique beauty,’” Naumann tells
Ladislaw, “‘not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the complete contentment of its
sensuous perfection: and there stands beauty in its breathing life, with the consciousness of
Christian centuries in its bosom. But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks almost
what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my picture” (177). Naumann uses the
pronoun “its” for Dorothea and for the Ariadne-Cleopatra, eliding the very distinction he claims
to make between the “corpse-like” one and the “breathing” one—and eliding the distinction
between his vision of her as a thinking, feeling subject and as an anachronistic objet d’art. In
107
“Casaubon can bring no ‘quickening power,’” Thompson continues; instead, Ladislaw appears “to guide
Dorothea through the ‘stupendous fragmentariness … the dreamlike strangeness’ and to ‘quicken’ the dead city for
her” (125).
126
fact, Naumann confesses to Ladislaw that he’d like to paint Dorothea as soon as learns she is
Ladislaw’s cousin, and he envisions her as a composite of Protestant and of Catholic feminine
types in quick succession: she is a nun; she is a Quaker, she is a Madonna, and, finally, she is “a
sort of Christian Antigone” (178).108 Naumann presses Ladislaw: “‘You are not angry with me
for thinking Mistress Second-Cousin the most perfect young Madonna’” (178). “‘If you were an
artist,’” Naumann continues, “‘you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form
animated by Christian sentiment—a sort of Christian Antigone—sensuous force controlled by
spiritual passion’” (178).
From Naumann’s perspective, Dorothea is a divine presence, since she is defined by a
kaleidoscopic—and a simultaneous—sequence of transfigurations that stretch across Western
civilizations and across Christian denominations even when she stands in the Vatican on this still
day in November 1829. Yet while Ladislaw and Naumann envision Dorothea as fleetingly
statuesque, Ladislaw argues that this painterly hodgepodge is half thought-out: “‘You want to
express too much with your painting’” (178). From Ladislaw’s perspective, Dorothea transcends
Naumann’s half-Protestant, half-Catholic iconography. “‘I do not think that all the universe is
straining towards the obscure significance of your pictures,” Ladislaw complains; “‘your
painting her was the chief outcome of her existence—the divinity passing into higher
completeness and all but exhausted in the act of covering your bit of canvas’” (178). Ladislaw
tempers Naumann’s momentary enthusiasm for his second cousin, for if Dorothea-the-Quaker,
108
In the finale, the narrator compares Dorothea to a new Theresa and a new Antigone in the finale: “For there is
no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa
will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic
piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever
gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of
which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know” (785).
127
Dorothea-the-Madonna, and Dorothea-the-Christian-Antigone are superimposed upon one
another, then they are merely fleeting allusions that strip Dorothea of her real, human character.
On one level, the conversation between Naumann and Ladislaw raises questions about
representations of spiritual life. Because Naumann imagines painting Dorothea as a nun, a
Quaker, a Madonna, and “a sort of Christian Antigone” (and she becomes a transhistorical
composite, fixed forever before the Ariadne-Cleopatra at the Vatican), Ladislaw questions what
painting can and cannot represent. On another level, the conversation raises questions about
whether the artworks or the collections in the Vatican could be understood by non-Catholics—
either in 1829 or in 1872. For, as Ladislaw argues a Quaker, a Madonna, and a nun aren’t
reconcilable feminine types; and the “Christian Antigone” may be the most striking paradox
Naumann imagines. Naumann’s vision of Dorothea as a composite in the Vatican is provocative
for several reasons: it is anachronistic, but it is also potentially offensive, since it superimposes
Protestantism and Catholicism upon one another. 1829–1832 and 1869–1872 were both periods
when the Pope and the Catholic Church resisted secular government, and Rome was, in turn,
isolated politically from the rest of the peninsula. Ladislaw’s impatience with Naumann may,
then, reflect his politics as well as his aesthetics: it would have been naïve to describe Dorothea
as a Quaker and as a Madonna, unless Naumann’s point was to render her the embodiment of a
religiopolitical crisis. Dorothea appears, then, as a painterly Corinne or a painterly Aurora
Leigh; she may be English, even provincially English, but she inspirits Anglo-Italian
iconographies. While many critics suggest that this moment reveals Eliot’s, and, consequently,
Dorothea’s, failure to interpret the Vatican in situ as an aesthetic shortcoming, I argue it’s much
more complicated. Dorothea, whom the narrator variously calls a Puritan, a Swiss Protestant,
128
and an Englishwoman, also has a decidedly political identity when she stands in the Vatican in
1829 and in a novel published in 1872.
For if this is a novel that is both about and not about the Risorgimento, then the narrator’s
ambivalence about Dorothea’s religious identity (what she believes or what Naumann and
Ladislaw superimpose upon her figure) is also subtly political. For as McCormack argues,
“Eliot’s nineteenth-century secularism particularly complicated her responses toward Italian
collections” (78). “Like most of her contemporaries,” McCormack continues, “Eliot favored the
Risorgimento but found the works she wanted to see most often in the custodianship of the
Catholic Church, which she consistently regarded as inflicting an effete superstition on the
people of Italy” (78). Whatever Eliot’s politics may have been (it’s clear her allegiances weren’t
simply republican, anti-republican, or anti-Catholic), the Risorgimento affected her (and her
characters’) perspective of the Vatican. For if Eliot couldn’t see specific works or collections
when she travelled to Rome in 1848, in 1860, in 1864, or in 1869, then her vision of the Vatican
was, necessarily, a post-Risorgimento composite: she saw the Vatican at moments when it was
most isolated from the rest of the peninsula. Naumann’s vision of Dorothea-as-Quaker,
Dorothea-as-Madonna, Dorothea-as-Christian-Antigone, and as paragon of solitude may be a
politicoaesthetic study that telescopes Protestant and Catholic figures—and the period between
1829 and 1872.
Eliot’s Victorian readers likely would have been much more sensitive than we are to the
religiously determined isolation of the Vatican and of the Catholic Church as a state within the
nation that had just become the United Kingdom of Italy (with a Roman capital) in July 1871.
After the Italian Army defeated the Papal Army on 19 September 1870—exactly the moment
when Eliot began drafting Books I–III—Pius IX barricaded himself within the Vatican walls,
129
despite the fact that Vittorio Emanuelle II had tried to negotiate peaceful entry in the days and
the weeks before defeat and despite the fact that the Pope was never in grave danger in the
months immediately following the Roman seizure. Pius IX and his successors from 1871 to
1929 believed themselves to be in self-imposed exile within the Vatican from the surrounding
Italian nation-state until Vatican City was granted sovereignty with the Lateran Treaty.109
Dorothea’s quickness—coupled with Ladislaw’s and Naumann’s discussion about their
own struggles to represent moment-to-moment impressions as words on a page or as strokes on a
canvas—dramatizes the otherwise unnarrated events to which the narrator alludes in the
historiographic prelude to chapter 19. Naumann’s vision of Dorothea as a nun, as a Quaker, as a
Madonna—and elsewhere as a St. Theresa- or as a St. Dorothea-esque figure—are among the
most fraught allusions to the Catholic Church and may be among the most, if not the only,
allusions to the Pope. Eliot’s treatment of Catholic iconography (like Naumann’s self-conscious
amalgamation of Quaker, Madonna, and Christian Antigone) may be an oblique nod to the
Pope’s real sequestration in the months and the years immediately following Rome’s annexation.
Understood in this context, Eliot’s disorientation within the Vatican may not be as naïve as
McCormack suggests. In the wake of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, the
narrator’s sensitivity to Dorothea’s quickness may be, rather, a quiet meditation on history or
historiography that was still uncertain.
109
Vittorio Emanuelle II sent Count Gustavo Ponza di San Martino to Pius IX with a peace offering that would
have allowed the peaceful entry of the Italian army into Rome. It also would have allowed the Pope to control—or
appear to control—the unfolding events. Pius IX refused the offer. Consequently, the Italian army crossed the
Papal frontier on 11 September and advanced toward Rome; Vittorio Emanuelle II was hopeful that Pius IX would
negotiate the peace offering; however, the Italian army reached the Aurelian Walls on 19 September and placed
Rome under siege. Pius IX remained intransigent and forced his troops to resist; on 20 September, after a three-hour
cannonade destroyed the Aurelian Wall at Porta Pia, the Italian army entered Rome and marched down Via Pia
(subsequently named Via XX Settembre), where soldiers on both sides were killed. Rome (and Latium) were
annexed to the Kingdom of Italy after a plebiscite was held on 2 October; the decree was held on 9 October. While
Pius IX declared himself a prisoner within the Vatican, the United Kingdom of Italy never threatened his life. Still,
many believe he would have been assassinated by revolutionaries. See Riall and Gilmore for a detailed history.
130
In the final paragraphs of the chapter, the narrator transcribes a conversation between
Ladislaw and Naumann that eerily echoes Miriam’s and Kenyon’s politicoaesthetic meditation
on temporality in The Marble Faun. Like Hawthorne, Eliot elides the characters’ misgivings
about the arts (painting for Miriam and for Naumann and sculpture for Kenyon), with a selfconscious, if subtle, meditation on the ways language suspends temporal representation.110
Ladislaw insists:
“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for being vague. After all,
the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.
I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere
coloured superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a
difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—this
woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice,
pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.” (179)
While scholars often suggest that Naumann is a caricature of the Pre-Raphaelites, the Nazarenes
(who gained notoriety in 1848 and held increasing clout during the 1850s and the 1860s),
110
Wiesenfarth, Rischin, and Downing read chapter 19 as a paragone, a debate about modes of representation that
functions on narrative and on metanarrative levels; the paragone has its origins in the Italian Renaissance.
Wiesenfarth, Rischin, and Downing emphasize Ladislaw’s—perhaps counter-intuitive—argument that language is a
“finer” medium for translating or transcribing temporality, since painting cannot convey moment-to-moment
change. Ladislaw “insists that language is the superior medium of representation because of its unique capacity to
express dynamism and temporal change,” Rischin writes; “Language can convey ‘movement’; painting, by
implication, only stasis. Language can depict temporal processes, including a woman’s subtle ‘change from
moment to moment’; painting, only a single moment, fixed and unchanging” (1122). “Ekphrasis in Middlemarch,”
Downing similarly argues, “re-presents ‘the frozen moment’ of sculpture while exploiting ‘that moment’s dynamic
implications’; it also imposes the stasis of a statue on the temporal flow of the text. As the narrative repeatedly
returns to the Vatican moment, ‘it converts is chronological progression into simultaneity, its temporally
unrepeatable flow into eternal recurrence” (435). Wiesenfarth and Downing side with Ladislaw, and not with
Naumann, and argue that this novel, too, is an extended paragone that pits language and painting against one
another. (In fact, Wiesenfarth and Downing both argue that Naumann’s preference for painting over language
renders Ladislaw, by contrast, a much more reliable character.) Rischin, however, suggests that Ladislaw is
undercut by the narrator, since this argument with Naumann is, too, isolated as one moment in one chapter in a novel
devoted to the theme of temporality. “While an ekphrastic lyric is self-contained, an ekphrastic moment embedded
in a novel” is just part of a continuous and often a non-linear plot (1124). Ladislaw’s faith in language (rather than
painting), then, is undercut by the fact that this paragone is just part of a chapter we often read as a foreshadowing of
the climax of the novel: the post-Rome chapters.
131
Ladislaw doesn’t share the worldview popularized by this generation of artists and critics.111 Yet
if we read Naumann as a mouthpiece for Ruskinian aesthetics, then we may also read Ladislaw
as a mouthpiece for Paterian aesthetics.
Indeed, his sensitivity to Dorothea’s voice, Dorothea’s breath, and the ways she changes
“from moment to moment” uncannily anticipates Walter Pater’s impressionistic Studies in the
History of the Renaissance (1873), which was published just one year after Middlemarch. Like
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, Studies in the History of the Renaissance is a
sustained meditation on temporality that puts the past and the present in counter-intuitive
juxtaposition and that shows how immediate a bygone period may be. Both Eliot and Pater
dilate on interpretation much more than documentary preservation. Like Eliot, Pater is
concerned with a person’s response to a work of art much more than the work of art itself.
Pater’s Renaissance is, then, a reaction to Ruskin’s Gothic; however, Studies doesn’t suggest that
Renaissance art is superior to Gothic art. Instead, Pater champions the idea of the Renaissance as
an alternative to the idea of the Gothic codified by Ruskin in 1851–1853: From Pater’s
perspective, the Renaissance defied chronology (it is not just about the fifteenth and the sixteenth
centuries) and geography (it is not just an Italian movement). Though Pater doesn’t address the
Risorgimento or the Unification of Italy, he does theorize the importance of momentary thinking
and momentary feeling with a sense of urgency often associated with Italian history during this
period. Pater’s The Renaissance isn’t, of course, read as a study of the period as much as it is a
111
For a discussion of Naumann as a Pre-Raphaelite or as a Nazarene, see especially Hugh Witemeyer.
Weisenfarth argues that this conversation is particularly Ruskinian, and he shows how Naumann’s and Ladislaw’s
characters are inflected by Eliot’s study of Ruskin. For Wiesenfarth, the conversation between Naumann and
Ladislaw recalls a review of Ruskin published by Eliot in 1854. According to Wiesenfarth, “George Eliot
elaborated Ruskin’s notion that art is a language in her 1854 review of his Edinburgh lectures on architecture and
painting: ‘The aim of Art, in depicting any natural object, is to produce in the mind analogous emotions to those
produced by the object itself; but as with all our skill and care we cannot imitate it exactly, this aim is not attained
by transcribing, but by translating it into the language of Art’” (365). Eliot’s critique of Ruskin’s lecture—
especially the parts that address art-as-language—resembles Ladislaw much more than Naumann. Wiesenfarth,
consequently, sees Naumann, much more than Ladislaw, as a fictional embodiment of Ruskinian ideology.
132
meditation on historical/historiographical reinterpretation. Likewise, chapter 19 begins and ends
with self-referential digressions about imminent change: the narrator’s gloss about the King and
the Prime Minister and Ladislaw’s monologue about the unrepresentable subtleties of his second
cousin’s breath and voice. Because this chapter begins and ends with a meditation on
fleetingness, temporality is a narrative and a metanarrative concern when chapter 20 opens.
Chapter 20 opens in the moments and the hours immediately following Dorothea’s non-
encounter with Naumann and Ladislaw. It is, however, primarily a retrospect of the weeks
leading up to what we’ve just read in chapter 19. The narrative in chapter 20 is (unlike chapters
19, 21, and 22) mostly free indirect discourse: we turn inward, from Naumann’s and Ladislaw’s
vision of Dorothea to what she herself is thinking and feeling immediately after seeing the
Ariadne-Cleopatra in the Vatican. Yet chapter 20 isn’t about her fleetingness, her quickness, or
her present-tense impressions. Instead, this much more impressionistic perspective of Dorothea
reveals what is truly worrying her: she realizes that her husband doesn’t love her, or she him,
and that the choices she made in her past will haunt her future in ways she hadn’t anticipated.
Chapter 20 is, then, an anomaly, since it is a much more psychological “study” of Dorothea than
chapters 19, 21, and 22. At the end of chapter 20, we witness Casaubon parting from Dorothea
at the doors of the Vatican Museum, where we know she will see the Ariande-Cleopatra, and
where we know Naumann and Ladislaw will first see her. Before I turn to chapter 20, where we
witness Dorothea’s telescoped disillusionment and disintegration, I will trace the aftermath of
chapter 19: in the final two chapters of “Old and Young,” we see her friendships with Naumann
and Ladislaw unfold and, even more crucially, we see these artists’ vision of Dorothea-thecomposite fully realized: she’s Ariadne, Cleopatra, a Quaker, a Madonna, a Christian Antigone,
and a nun, but by the end of the volume, she’s also St. Clare.
133
When Ladislaw dines with Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon in chapter 22, he insists that she
“should not go away without seeing a studio or two,” and he offers to take her to visit
Naumann’s (199). Just before Ladislaw introduces Dorothea and Casaubon to Naumann, the
narrator glosses him as “one of the chief renovators of Christian art, one of those who had not
only revived but expanded that grand conception of supreme events as mysteries at which the
successive ages were spectators, and in relation to which the great souls of all periods became as
it were contemporaries” (199). Naumann’s vision of Dorothea as a transhistorical figure is most
fully realized, then, in chapter 22, not in chapter 19, where she appears as the model for his
painting of St. Clare. Naumann proposes that Casaubon and that Dorothea sit for him as soon as
they arrive: he paints Casaubon as St. Thomas Aquinas and Dorothea as St. Clare. Casaubon
offers to buy the portraits of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Clare; however, Naumann won’t part
with his study of Dorothea, who seems, as Ladislaw had predicted, to resist representation, even
divine representation: “The Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place, Naumann
declared himself to be dissatisfied with—he could not, in conscience, engage to make a worthy
picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the arrangement was conditional” (203). While chapter 20
seems, at least at first, to describe a quintessentially mid-nineteenth-century rite of passage (a
visit to the artist’s studio), this visit is an intellectual and spiritual (not just an aesthetic)
culmination that transcends earthly realms. For Naumann, the Santa Clara represents Dorothea’s
suspended, transhistorical transfigurations: he idealizes his painting, even in its unfinished state.
From Naumann’s perspective, Dorothea embodies holy femininities (she is a Quaker, a
Madonna, a Christian Antigone, a semi-painted Santa Clara, and a nun) that may be
irreconcilable. Naumann isn’t the first to beatify Dorothea: St. Clare is the third saint with
whom she is associated: the other two are St. Theresa and St. Dorothea. Eliot associates
134
Dorothea with St. Theresa both in the preface and in the finale, and St. Dorothea may be her
heroine’s implicit namesake.112 Book I is, then, coyly titled, for the “Miss Brooke” we encounter
on the first page of the novel proper already seems to be two saints at once.113 In the preface, the
narrator writes that St. Theresa’s “nature demanded an epic life,” and Dorothea’s presence in
Eliot’s novel and in Naumann’s painting intimates that she, too, will be an “epic” heroine (3).
Yet while the narrator reminds us, often self-consciously, of Dorothea’s present-tense existence
in 1829 (rather than in 1872), during the Rome chapters, the preface and the finale connect her to
a sixteenth-century saint whose life on earth is secondary to the good she inspires in people years
after her death and her beatification:
That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last
of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic
life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a
112
In fact, Eliot may have had Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1644–1647) in mind, for it is
held by “the small church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome” (Maertz 31). Gregory Maertz reminds us that
Eliot saw this statue during her visit to Rome in 1860; from him it is “recast as the emblem of Dorothea’s idealized
vision of marriage to Casaubon” (31). The Ecstasy of St. Theresa, “represents the exact moment of transverberation
and depicts Theresa in a state of total abandon that closely follows her remarkably erotic autobiographical account:
‘[the angel of the Lord] was holding a long golden spear, and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire.
With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I
thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God’ (St. Teresa of
Jesus: The Complete Works)” (31). “By indicating the symbolic importance of Bernini’s The Ecstasy to her
conception of Dorothea Brooke,” Maertz continues, Eliot “establishes a pattern that will recur throughout the novel:
works of art that she saw on her first Italian journey function as signposts of meaning—mythical, historical,
psychological, and emotional—in the text. In addition, this early reference to Bernini’s The Ecstasy also suggests
the importance of the ‘eternal city’ in the Dorothea-Casaubon-Ladislaw plotline” (31). Moreover, as we’ve seen
both in chapter one and in chapter two, Bernini was preoccupied with representing in stone what Hawthorne terms
“the intervals between two breaths” and what Eliot terms “quickness.”
113
Both St. Clare of Assisi (1194–1253) and St. Theresa of Avila (1515–1582) founded orders: St. Clare founded
the Order of Poor Ladies (known now as the Poor Clares), and St. Theresa reformed the Carmelite Order and
founded the Discalced Carmelite Order. Both the Poor Clares and the Carmelites are mendicant orders, meaning
that they relinquish worldly possessions as an act of faith. For discussions of Dorothea as a nineteenth-century St.
Theresa or St. Dorothea, see especially Hilary Fraser and Elinor Shaffer. St. Theresa and St. Dorothea seem to have
been especially resonant figures for Anglo-American expatriates in Italy at midcentury. Margaret Fuller discusses
St. Theresa in a dispatch written on 9 August 1847 and published 11 September 1847: “These things make me feel
that, if the state of woman in Italy is so depressed, yet a good-will toward a better is not wholly wanting. Still more
significant is the reverence of the Madonna and innumerable female saints, who, if like St. Teresa, they had intellect
as well as piety, became counselors no less than comforters to the spirit of men” (143). Anna Jameson discusses St.
Dorothea in Sacred and Legendary Art (published as a six-volume series from 1848 to 1864; the final volumes were
published posthumously).
135
life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the
meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and
sank unwept into oblivion. (3)
“Here and there is born a Saint Theresa,” the narrator continues, “foundress of nothing, whose
loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among
hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed” (3–4). When we turn the page
and find “Miss Brooke,” we expect to find these “loving heart-beats and sobs” revivified in
Eliot’s heroine. By the end of the novel, the narrator does bind Dorothea to Theresa much more
directly, regardless of the good she has or hasn’t done in the interim. Like the manifold
“Theresas” of the preface, the manifold “Dorotheas” of the finale idealize followers of Theresa
and of Dorothea as reformers (785). Yet the narrator cautions us against reading Dorothea,
Theresa, or even Clare as figures who transcend the historic, even if they embody ultimate
goodness. The final line of Middlemarch may be the most famous, and it describes “the
Dorothea whose story we know” (785). Tellingly, the narrator turns from Theresa and from
Dorothea (and from the plural Theresas and Dorotheas yet to come) to a much more universal
moral about anonymity: “for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric
acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the
number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (785).
Unlike Naumann, Ladislaw intuits that this selflessness is a crucial part of Dorothea’s
character. This realization influences his growing affection for her. Even though Naumann’s
iconography affects the rhetoric the narrator uses to describe Ladislaw’s “worship” of Dorothea,
she is, to him, a real woman, and a real married woman. Still, the narrator intimates that “there
were plenty of contradictions in his imaginative demands” of Dorothea, though Ladislaw’s
136
“contradictions” are very different from Naumann’s (204). For Ladislaw, she isn’t a composite
of saints, of nuns, or of historical women; but she is most alluring when she is most faithful to
her husband, and he feels guilty for feeling attracted to her. “It was beautiful to see how
Dorothea’s eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to Mr Casaubon,” Ladislaw
confesses to himself, and “she would have lost some of her halo if she had been without that
duteous preoccupation” (204). Ultimately, the narrator abstracts Naumann’s and Ladislaw’s
“worship” of Dorothea, and suggests that this “worship” must remain unreciprocated if she is to
remain enthroned: “The remote worship of a woman throned out of their reach plays a great part
in men’s lives, but in most cases the worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some
approving sign by which his soul’s sovereign may cheer him without descending from her high
place” (204).
Dorothea often appears as a “contradiction” to us, too. While Naumann, Ladislaw, and
the narrator idealize her in chapters 19, 21, and 22, she diverges from our expectations in many
ways, especially in chapter 20. For though she is a heroine in the novel, we already know that
she will transcend her identities as Miss Brooke and as Mrs. Casaubon when she returns from
Rome to Middlemarch, even if we don’t yet know when or how. Embedded between chapter 19
and chapters 21 and 22, the narrator’s inward turn in chapter 20 shows how Dorothea isn’t as
flawless as Naumann, Ladislaw, and the narrator have intimated. In many ways, this chapter is
unnerving, because it reveals that Dorothea is much more vulnerable than other people assume
her to be. “Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to herself,”
Eliot writes, “and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act that was
struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault
of her own spiritual poverty” (180). While the vision of Dorothea as the Ariadne, the Cleopatra,
137
the Christian Antigone, the Quaker, the Madonna, the semi-painted St. Clare, or a modern-day
St. Theresa or St. Dorothea renders her an ur-heroine, she is, at the same time, an un-heroine.
Dorothea’s twofold status as ur-/un-heroine is important to our appreciation of her “unhistoric
acts,” especially in chapter 20, since Rome inspires in her a desire to reconcile grand narratives
(codified most obviously in Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies) with her own much more
fragmented interpretation of the world. In fact, J. Hillis Miller argues that this novel is
suspicious of grand narratives. Just as “Casaubon’s futile search for a key to all mythologies
hardly inspires confidence in the reader that he or she might find a key to the mythological
references in Middlemarch,” we should be wary of reading Dorothea as a person who
simultaneously embodies feminine icons from the last two thousand years (Miller,
“Middlemarch’s ‘Finale’” 144). J. Hillis Miller calls this Dorothea’s “apotheosis,” and he
contends that Dorothea’s manifold “apotheosis” results in inconclusiveness, not conclusiveness,
as D. A. Miller similarly argues (145). Eliot intimates that Dorothea senses this herself, for she
experiences “a stifling depression” in the Eternal City and in the Vatican specifically, where “the
large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were
replaced by ante-rooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither” (183).
Indeed, the divergences between chapters 19, 21, and 22 and chapter 20 suggest that this
novel proposes we read history, as Dorothea and as Ladislaw do, as an anti-grand narrative
materialized, perhaps, in the “winding passages” of the Vatican. While Dorothea “had been led
through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the
greatest ruins and the most glorious churches,” Eliot writes, “she ended by oftenest choosing to
drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away from the
oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with
138
enigmatical costumes” (181). For Dorothea, the achronology and the nonlinearity of the Vatican
are overwhelming, and she cannot reconcile her own, much more compressed, present tense
against the Eternal City’s vast history:
Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present,
where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy
of a superstition divorced from reverence; the chiller but yet eager Titanic life
gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose
marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast
wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the
signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an
electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a
glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion. (181)
Dorothea’s impressions of Rome, then, suggest that she envisions an anti-Key to All
Mythologies: her measured readings and understandings of Rome’s “vast wreck” resist the soonto-be obsolete impulses of the Grand Tourist, since she cannot picture herself to be part of a
totalizing panorama.
Middlemarch may have an “epic” scope (as Eliot intimates in the preface through St.
Theresa), but the historical or historiographical sensibility that unfolds in this chapter isn’t
monolithic. Middlemarch, the narrator writes, is “an experiment in Time” (3). “The unhistorical
and the unwritten, the unknown people who have read the book before us, temper the hubris of
epic scope,” Beer writes; “Middlemarch makes its claim to inclusiveness by demurring at any
all-embracing explanation, by offering us at last the sense of things left out: an elegy for all
those unknown others by whom at any time the single reader is surrounded” (34). Read in this
139
light, it’s clearer how Dorothea may be—counter-intuitively—a St. Theresa or a St. Clare: it’s
not that she embodies the saints themselves but that she revivifies the spirit of their teachings:
“unhistoric” selflessness. “[B]ut why always Dorothea?” Auerbach, Chase, and, most pointedly,
the narrator ask (261). Indeed, as Chase reminds us, the narrator “checks her own tendency to
enshrine her heroine, thus warning readers to be conscious of the distortions of narrative
privilege” (11). Dorothea undermines our tendency to enshrine or enthrone her in chapter 20,
during a moment when she and the narrator are epistemologically merged. For in chapter 20, we
witness her meditation on the disillusionment and the disintegration she realizes just after leaving
the Vatican. Within the Vatican and the Eternal City, Dorothea is, finally, humbled.
Whether scholars love or hate Dorothea, most question why we think of her as the
heroine, not as a heroine, since Middlemarch is a “study” of a town, not a person. Dorothea does
have a singular hold on her readers, in part because she is figuratively beatified in the preface
and in the finale, but also because she telescopes Middlemarchers’ present tense with a much
more distant past, especially in chapter 20, where we witness what she thinks and feels abroad in
the Eternal City. For though we see Dorothea in Middlemarch and in Rome, as Miss Brooke,
Mrs. Casaubon, Mrs. Ladislaw, and as an anonymous, if ever-present type (the many “Theresas”
in the preface and the many “Dorotheas” in the finale), she remains distinctive in many ways.
While Dorothea can’t know that Naumann and Ladislaw see her as the Ariadne-Cleopatra’s
stony double, she falls apart when she returns from the Vatican. Indeed, she seems to recognize
what many critics have since said of her: that she is defined by her “confused” and “fractured”
identities, not by iconographic perfection (Hardy 12). For as Hardy argues, Middlemarch
“diffuses the singleness and stability of novelistic character, eventually breaking up Dorothea’s
stable ego into the plurality of ‘many Dorotheas,’ and forcing Dorothea’s experience of a
140
confused and fractured sense of identity on the character-centered reader” (12). “Like
Dorothea,” Hardy continues, “the reader is also forced out of fiction into an awareness of
history,” for we, too, are forced to contend with the “absences” and the “fragmentations” she
faces herself (12).
We often read the “absences” and the “fragmentations” Dorothea realizes as euphemistic
allusions to her unhappy marriage with Casaubon.114 Yet though chapter 20 seems, at least at
first, to be a non-sequitur between chapter 19 and chapters 21 and 22, “absences” and
“fragmentations” are its very subject. In fact, the striking difference between the scope of
chapter 19—the “winding passages”—and chapter 20—a meditation on temporality from
Dorothea’s perspective—invite us to consider the two as a counter-intuitive diptych. That we
first glance Dorothea in the museum and at a remove forces us to approximate what she’s
thinking and feeling. When the narrator reveals her actual impressions in the middle of chapter
20, her distress seems much more personal than it might have had we read it in real time (in
chapter 18 or in the beginning of chapter 19). Eliot’s Rome chapters contain layers within layers
of fragmentations (as I’ve suggested earlier). This particular chapter is about Dorothea’s
intellectual and spiritual disunion with Casaubon. Moreover, chapters 19–22 realize Dorothea’s
114
For readings that discuss chapter 20 primarily as a meditation on Dorothea’s unhappy marriage, see French,
Weisenfarth, McCormack, Hardy, Rischin, Trotter, and Brattin. French argues that this chapter unveils Dorothea’s
romantic shock and chronicles “the overwhelming impact upon a provincial English Protestant girl of the gigantic
splendors of Imperial and Papal Rome” (340). For French, Dorothea’s “shock” is decidedly emotional, not
intellectual, spiritual, or “aesthetic” (340). French contends that Dorothea “doesn’t understand (as we, the readers,
are to) that the concrete images of Rome which offer themselves to her consciousness as a major part or symptom of
her unhappiness are really images of something else too—of her marriage” (341). Weisenfarth similarly argues that
“the splendid ruins and art of Rome are memorials of a once vibrant spiritual life that stand to mock a modern world
notably bereft of religious belief” (366). “Rome is an image of Dorothea’s soul,” he continues, and this city “has
longed to find a spiritual ideal in marriage and has found only desolation.” (366). Like French and Weisenfarth,
Brattin reads the incompatibility between Dorothea and Casaubon in terms of her intellectual shortcomings:
“Dorothea has had no education to prepare her to take delight or nourishment from Italian art—for Mrs Casaubon,
the fragments of sculpture she sees are only the sad, lifeless relics of a bygone civilization. At her husband’s
direction, Dorothea views many works of classical and Renaissance art—and sobs, as she thinks about her unhappy
marriage” (293). “But no matter how kissable Dorothea is,” Brattin continues, “Casaubon’s response to her is like
his response to Italy: pedantic, not romantic” (295).
141
“absences” and “fragmentations” within the novel as a whole, and on redoubled structural levels.
On the chapter-level, Eliot unhinges our chronological expectations by bookending chapter 20
with the Naumann-Ladislaw-Dorothea plot. It’s clear that this disorientation is a meaningful
one, since she moved chapters 19–22 as a unit, from Book III to Book II. On the book-level,
then, Eliot dislocates us from Middlemarch to Rome and from Rosamond’s perspective to
Dorothea’s for strategic reasons: chapters 19–22 needed to be in Book II, not in Book III,
because Eliot wanted to keep the “Miss Brooke” plot in the forefront of her readers’ minds.
Consequently, our readings of chapter 20 often parallel our readings of chapter 42 in
Henry James’s celebrated novel The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1881). For these chapters open
with Dorothea Casaubon and Isabel Osmond alone in their respective rooms and regretting their
respective marriages; their narrators turn to free indirect discourse, and we are privy to each
woman’s innermost mind at the moment when she confesses to herself that her marriage is a
failure; these chapters close just as Dorothea and Isabel are jolted from these worries about their
pasts and their futures to a present tense that is, from our perspective, much more distant.
Moreover, both chapter 20 and chapter 42 take place in Rome. Throughout this crucial chapter,
then, Eliot’s narrator hovers between third-person omniscience and free indirect discourse, and
that flickering line between knowing and not-quite-knowing what Dorothea is thinking and
feeling exaggerates our sense of her epistemological crisis: the “stupendous fragmentariness”
she experiences when she sees the ruins, basilicas, palaces, and colossi “heightened the
dreamlike strangeness of her bridal life” (180). That the narrator discerns Dorothea’s inward
sense of “fragmentariness” may not be surprising, for when we first see her in the Vatican, she is
defined by her parallel, if outward, expressions of fleetingness and quickness: the nervous
rustles of her skirt as she turns from the Ariadne-Cleopatra to exit the hall. Like James’s Isabel,
142
Eliot’s Dorothea experiences impressions to be true realizations. They aren’t bookishly
prescribed. They’re what she really thinks and feels.
While we often imagine that Dorothea loses faith in Casaubon’s still unfinished Key to
All Mythologies because she believes he is incapable of finishing it, this impressionistic chapter
shows how she also loses faith in it because she disagrees with his historical assumptions.
Dorothea questions the overarching logic of Casaubon’s work: “But was not Mr Casaubon just
as learned as before? Had his forms of expression changed, or his sentiments become less
laudable? O waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his ability to state not
only a theory but the names of those who held it; or his provision for giving the heads of any
subject on demand?” (183). This chapter is crucial aesthetically and intellectually but also
because Dorothea realizes she isn’t compatible with her husband romantically. Dorothea may
have been attracted to, and intimidated by, Casaubon’s intellect before travelling from
Middlemarch to Rome; however, in the moments and the hours after seeing the Vatican, she
realizes her historical perspective is fundamentally different from her husband’s: “from the very
first she had thought of Mr Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he must
often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share,” she confesses to herself; yet
“after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was beholding Rome, the city of visible
history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funereal procession with strange
ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar” (180). Casaubon claims that his historical
study demands bookish sequestration. Dorothea realizes, in the first month of her marriage, and
on her honeymoon, that her husband will never find a Key to All Mythologies from readings of
books alone. From her perspective, the allure of the Eternal City is its illegibility. That she
envisions Rome as a “funereal procession” is telling, not just because “Old and Young”
143
anticipates Casaubon’s death but also because it shows how he thinks in terms of ineffable pasts,
and she feels overwhelmed by the ways these pasts make her present and her future tenses seem
all the more bitter, if only for their ephemerality.
Dorothea distinguishes her understanding of history from her husband’s, and she
envisions Rome through a series of impressions, not through a much more totalizing narrative.
She internalizes the “fragmentariness” she witnesses during her tour of the Vatican and the
Eternal City as a useful mnemonic. For the key, if there is a key, to reading and to understanding
contemporary Rome is its ever-present—and suspended—resistance to spiritual, intellectual,
politicoaesthetic, and narrative unity. Unlike Casaubon, Dorothea realizes that this city could not
be understood monolithically. It requires an appreciation for the smallness and the realness of
one’s present-tense experiences against mythological vagueness:
To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a knowledge
which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and traces out the
suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome may still be the spiritual
centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical
contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust
abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss
Puritanism, fed on meager Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the
handscreen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of
knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick
emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl
who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried
144
duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.
(181)
Dorothea’s intuition in 1829 that Rome “may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the
world” is prescient, especially given both the 1830–1831 and the 1870–1871 upheavals readers
must have had in mind when they first read “Old and Young” in February 1872: her epiphany,
which we witness second-hand in this passage, shows how she has been “quickened” by the
Eternal City itself. When we remember this twofold historical context, Dorothea’s lost faith in
the Key to All Mythologies suggests that she, rather than her husband, will be the discerning
historian of Middlemarch.
It’s not surprising, then, that Dorothea identifies with Ladislaw (and not with Casaubon)
during her time in Rome. For when Ladislaw dines with the Casaubons, he confesses “that
Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a whole; the fragments stimulated his
imagination and made him constructive” (199). Tellingly, Ladislaw’s “new sense of history as a
whole,” which is, paradoxically, predicated on an appreciation for “fragments,” is inspired by his
dismissal of Casaubon’s study, which “had always been of too broad a kind” (198). Brattin
reminds us that “[a]n alternate version of this important passage appears in the manuscript on the
verso of a subsequent page, and the details in that earlier version make clear how a creative soul
like Will Ladislaw’s can make use of the fragments of Italian history and culture he finds in
Rome” (296). The difference between the manuscript and the novel is striking. In the
manuscript, this passage first read “‘Rome had given him quite a new sense of continuity in
history as a whole’” (qtd. in Brattin 296). Eliot revised it, and it read “‘a new sense of unbroken
history as a unity’” (296). Eliot revised it, again, though, and it read, in its final form “a new
sense of history as a whole,” the same as the first version but without the words “continuity in”
145
between “sense of” and “history as.” Eliot acknowledges in the margins that this “‘might seem
paradoxical, but fragments obliged you to think of the way in which they could be put together to
make wholes’” (296). Still, the difference—a subtle difference—between the first and the third
versions is significant: the absence of the word “continuity” suggests Ladislaw’s—and Eliot’s—
final rejection of continuity as a principle of history and historiography.
By the end of chapter 22, Dorothea and Ladislaw internalize the theory of provisional
history/historiography Eliot outlines in the preface. Ultimately, their newfound appreciations for
“fragmentariness”—and their respective apprehensions about Casaubon’s Key to All
Mythologies—suggest that their new historical/historiographical visions are tantamount to the
narrator’s “experiments in Time” (3). Moreover, the realizations that Dorothea and that
Ladislaw respectively have—independent from one another—in fact bring them together,
intellectually, spiritually, and, finally, romantically. At the end of chapter 22, Dorothea tells
Ladislaw “‘I am so glad we met in Rome,’” and the “in Rome” part of her sentence may be the
most important, since this is where they realize their well-matched worldviews (208). When
Dorothea complains that this city depresses her because she sees life as “‘much uglier and more
bungling than the pictures’” hanging in the museums, Ladislaw encourages her to look outward,
as she was when he first saw her at the Vatican: “‘You are too young—it is an anachronism for
you to have such thoughts’” (206). Though Dorothea doesn’t marry Ladislaw until the finale of
the novel, their conversation at the end of chapter 22 shows how they grow to love one another
in part because they return from Rome to Middlemarch with forward-looking perspectives.
Rome, in fact, lingers as a series of fragmented allusions in the rest of the novel, and it’s
clear Dorothea’s and Ladislaw’s historical consciousnesses are, in many ways, grounded in the
146
shared worldviews they develop, independently but simultaneously, in the Eternal City.
McCormack outlines the Roman echoes in the rest of the novel:
Indeed when Will and Dorothea see each other in England they nearly always
think of Rome. Under the pretext of a sketching tour, he walks to Lowick in
hopes of seeing Dorothea alone, telling her “I wanted to talk about things as we
did in Rome” (266). When he goes to Lowick Church he notices her bonnet and
cloak, “the same that she had worn in the Vatican” (346). Despairing of the
distance between them even before he knows of Casaubon’s codicil, Will
concludes, “I might as well be at Rome” (365). When he comes to say goodbye
the first time, still calmly unaware of Casaubon’s will, the narrator compares this
meeting with their first one “in Rome when Will had been embarrassed and
Dorothea calm” (395). On this occasion Dorothea delights in Will’s newly
formed political ambitions because “when we were in Rome, I thought you only
cared for poetry and art, and the things that adorn life for us who are well off. But
now I know you think about the rest of the world” (395). After her unfortunate
intrusion on Will and Rosamond, she cries for “her lost belief which she had
planted and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome” (576).
(McCormack 86)
For, as McCormack intimates through this catalogue, if we are to read the rest of the novel in
terms of a marriage plot for “Miss Brooke” (and her relationship with Ladislaw, and not with
Casaubon, as her inevitable romantic resolution), then we should trace the ways she and
Ladislaw think, feel, and read history much more compatibly than the ways she and Casaubon
did in the first three books.
147
Of course, Middlemarch isn’t just about the marriage plot that follows “Miss Brooke,”
and it is a study of a town, not a person alone. Still, Casaubon’s, Ladislaw’s, and Dorothea’s
particular interests in narrative continuities and discontinues and in fragmentariness throughout
chapters 19–22 are especially provocative given what happened in Rome between 1829 and 1869
(when Eliot first started drafting Middlemarch) and what was happening in Rome between 1870
and 1872 (when she merged Rosamond’s story with Dorothea’s and published the two as a
whole). In many ways, Dorothea’s and Ladislaw’s prescient disavowals of Casaubon’s
mythological grand narrative anticipate recent arguments about the Risorgimento and the
Unification of Italy. Their shifting historical/historiographical worldviews may be read, in fact,
as realist extensions of Eliot’s own ambivalence about Italy’s uncertain future during the First,
the Second, and the Third Wars of Independence. It’s not necessarily that they embody Eliot’s
not-quite republican, not-quite-anti-republican, mid-nineteenth-century political sentiment, but
that they come to understand the Eternal City and especially the Vatican with the “quickened
consciousness” characterizing Eliot’s private essays (written after her 1860 and her 1864 visits).
For Eliot, like Dorothea and like Ladislaw, was suspicious of sightseeing Italy through
artworks, through guidebooks, and especially through myths. Just as Dorothea and Ladislaw
understand present-tense Italy in terms of fragmentation—and argue that this fragmentation is
forever suspended—historians and literary historians now understand our ideas about the
Risorgimento to be a myth: the Unification of Italy wasn’t the necessary resolution to a longnineteenth-century struggle. Moreover, the long-nineteenth-century struggle wasn’t really one
struggle; it was many. Indeed, as Thompson argues, Eliot “was drawn to myths and herself
given to myth-making,” and “the Italian Risorgimento provided a rich source of material (events,
figures, images and key texts) which could be incorporated into her own fictions to generate
148
precise meanings locally within her texts, but which also resonate outwards suggestively towards
the larger body of myth with which they are connected” (8). Thompson contends, however, that
Eliot “did not feel the need to probe the myths of the Italian Risorgimento too deeply, but rather
allowed them to stand in causal relation to that most ‘miraculous’ event in European history, the
Unification of Italy” (9). Yet when Eliot published “Old and Young” in February 1872, less than
one year after Rome was declared the capital of the kingdom, Rome’s annexation wasn’t,
perhaps, as certain as we now assume it was. Moreover, while Thompson suggests that Eliot
didn’t “probe the myths of the Italian Risorgimento too deeply,” Dorothea’s and Ladislaw’s love
for Rome and for one another is predicated on the fragmentations that dismantle these myths.
Just as our new historicist interpretations question whether the Unification of Italy was the
inevitable consequence of the Risorgimento, Middlemarch proposes narratives that don’t have
predictable continuities, discontinuities, or conclusions. It may not be clear (at least at first)
whether Dorothea’s and Rosamond’s plots, the narrator’s twinned studies of Middlemarch and of
Rome, and, most provocatively, her reader’s twofold present tenses will come together; but that’s
the point. Ultimately, the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy may be consummate nonendings for real reasons: they hadn’t yet happened in 1829, even though they belonged to an
already mythologized past when Middlemarch was first published in 1872.
149
CHAPTER 3
Florence, 1848–1870
Meaningful “Discrepancies”: Twofold Exposition in Casa Guidi Windows
For twenty-first-century readers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows
(1851) is often disorienting, because it traces the expatriate poet’s disintegrating faith in Grand
Duke Leopold II, in Pope Pius IX, and even in the Florentine people. Casa Guidi Windows is
known now for its twofold structure.115 The first part narrates the immediate aftermath of 12
September 1847, when Leopold II promised to support the Florentine civic guard, despite his
personal and political allegiances to Austria. The second part narrates the immediate aftermath
of 2 May 1849, when the Austrian army occupied Florence after Leopold II fled from Florence
and then from Siena to Gaeta, where he had renewed allegiances with Pius IX and with Emperor
Franz Joseph I. The Grand Duke’s militarized re-entry seemed especially duplicitous, for the
Austrians had defeated the Sardinians (who supported the independence of duchies in central
115
In Barrett Browning’s 1847–1849 manuscripts, part one appears as a single poem with at least four different
titles: “A Hope in Tuscany,” “A Hope in Italy,” “A Meditation in Tuscany,” and “A Meditation and a Dream.”
Editors in Great Britain refused to publish the first part of what became Casa Guidi Windows before the second part
was even written; as early as 1848, the first part “elicited from Blackwood the first of many bad notices (as the poet
quotes it to her sister): ‘[It] is a ‘grand poem’ but past all human understanding’” (Schor 306). Still, in 1849,
Barrett Browning wrote the second part, and in 1851, “the two-part poem entitled Casa Guidi Windows was
published by Chapman and Hall” along “with notes and an Advertisement” (306). Esther Schor and Leigh Coral
Harris remind us that this pre-1851 and immediately post-1851 reception history has affected our reading of the
poem as a whole. “To varying degrees,” Harris writes, “the Athenaeum, Fraser’s Magazine, the Prospective
Review, and the Spectator all produce a split analysis of the poem in terms of its ‘body’ (structure) and ‘spirit’
(content). This bifurcated critical approach to Casa Guidi Windows is also a hierarchical one in which the poem’s
subject matter is privileged over its form” (125). “While Barrett Browning’s Victorian reviewers leveled criticism at
the formal qualities in almost all of her work,” Harris continues, “their concentration on this poem’s structural
failures—too fluid, too female, too Italian—carries special resonance,” since it “serves as a way to dispel the threat
of a woman’s engagement with politics; but it also conveniently deflects attention from the politics of Britain’s
attitude towards Italian nationalism” (125).
150
Italy, including Tuscany, Parma, and Modena) at Novara on 22–23 March 1849. While Casa
Guidi Windows is predicated on historical/historiographical symmetries (parts one and two
document the processions that took place in the Piazza de’ Pitti on 12 September and on 2 May),
these processions had inverse consequences on the future of the revolution. Indeed, the
Florentine civic guard we see in the first part and the Austrian army we see in the second part
embody two distinct possibilities for central Italy during the mid-nineteenth century. Not
surprisingly, the poet is overwhelmed by the Austrian and the Florentine forces in very different
ways.
Barrett Browning’s skeptics have suggested that her “political” poems are defined by
feeling or overfeeling rhetoric and not by reasoned exposition, and that this pathos is often unself-conscious. Yet she advertises Casa Guidi Windows as a self-conscious meditation on
political sentiment. The poem chronicles very public expressions of ambivalence: Barrett
Browning critiques the Grand Duke’s wayward allegiances to Florentines, to Austrians, and to
the Catholic Church. The poet witnesses the moments when he implicitly pledges and then
implicitly betrays his support of a provisional Tuscan republic, and she witnesses these moments
as she looks through the windows of her home (the Casa Guidi) into his (the Palazzo Pitti). The
lines between public and private political sentiment are, Barrett Browning intimates, quite thin.
The poet’s secular crisis follows closely in the wake of the Pope’s and the Grand Duke’s
betrayals; and her frustration with the Florentine people may be grounded in their failure to
temper their fervent support of the Pope and the Grand Duke in the interim between parts one
and two.
Barrett Browning’s ambivalent representation of 1847–1849 Florence is important, for as
Julia Markus attests, “the enthusiasm for the Grand Duke in 1847 and the disillusionment with
151
him in 1849 accurately reflect the attitude of all of liberal Europe before and after the revolutions
of 1848” (Introduction xvii). Markus stresses that this poem is predicated on a “disparity”
between parts one and two (xvii). For as the poet realizes she betrayed herself by trusting the
Pope and especially the Grand Duke in part one, she must contend with her own, perhaps
unexpected, ambivalence in part two. Yet the “disparity” Barrett Browning faces between 12
September 1847 and 2 May 1849 is alarming, because she realizes her trust in the Pope and the
Grand Duke was unwarranted, even if her faith in the Risorgimento wasn’t—and still isn’t.
Because of this twofold structure, Casa Guidi Windows remains “one of the most detailed
accounts of the political happenings in Florence in 1847 and 1849 that has come down to us”
(xxx).116 Markus argues that Barrett Browning loses faith in the Pope and in the Grand Duke,
but not in the Risorgimento; this tempered patriotism extends across the poem as a whole. Still,
contemporary readers struggle to interpret Casa Guidi Windows as a serious historical or
historiographical record, in part because it is so self-consciously ambivalent. Esther Schor
argues that this distinction (between faith in the Pope or the Grand Duke and faith in the
Risorgimento) is ungrounded: “Markus all but concedes that the poem’s chief vulnerability lies
in its conflicted political stance” (307). “A poem of political acuity, it seems, must be acquitted
from the charge of self-contradiction,” Schor continues, “and Markus’s strategy is to temper and
qualify the positions taken in Part I” to make sense of Part 2 (307). In this chapter, I extend
Markus’s argument that Casa Guidi Windows demonstrates Barrett Browning’s tempered
politicoaesthetic temperament both in part one and in part two, that this seeming “selfcontradiction” is, in fact, crucial our understanding of the poem as a whole, though it often
unnerves twenty-first-century readers. Rather than reading the poet’s wavering faith in the
116
For discussions of Barrett Browning as a self-conscious documentarian, see Dolores Rosenblum, Steve Dillon
and Katherine Frank, Christopher Keirstead, and Fabienne Moine.
152
Grand Duke, the Pope, or the future of a republic as “self-contradiction,” however, I read it as a
meaningful patriotic sentiment: ambivalence.
In fact, as Schor attests, critics are often reluctant to dilate on Barrett Browning’s
ambivalence, though they frequently discuss it in passing, because such waverings seem to
compromise the integrity of her politics and her poetics, even among twenty-first-century
readers. Perhaps we aren’t unnerved by the poet’s seemingly compromised faith in the
Risorgimento as much as we are by the fact that this newly realized ambivalence is a mirror
image of the Pope’s and of the Grand Duke’s. When the Pope and the Grand Duke retract (or
betray) their purported allegiances to the Italian people, the poet, in turn, retracts her (albeit
hesitating) allegiances to them. It’s important to remember, though, that the poet’s faith is
dashed by the Pope and by the Grand Duke, not by the Risorgimento. Indeed, as Markus’s and
Schor’s opposing readings testify, this distinction is often much more nuanced than we might
assume. Yet even if critics have elided Barrett Browning’s faith in the Grand Duke, the Pope,
and the Florentine people with her faith in the Risorgimento, many have recognized that this
poem is predicated on the torn allegiances she experiences across parts one and two. Lewis
mentions Barrett Browning’s “deep ambivalence” twice in her close reading of Casa Guidi
Windows (161, 162). Alison Chapman, Fabienne Moine, Marianne Camus, and Steve Dillon and
Katherine Frank, too, gloss Barrett Browning’s negotiations about her faith in the Pope, the
Grand Duke, and even the Risorgimento as “ambivalent.” Because this chapter is primarily
about Risorgimento Florence (not Risorgimento Rome), I’ll focus attention on Barrett
Browning’s treatment of the Grand Duke’s equivocations (not the Pope’s).117 While there are
good reasons to trace parallels between the Grand Duke’s and the Pope’s ambivalence toward the
117
There is a twin project lurking behind my readings of parts one and two that would demonstrate the Pope’s
equally ambivalent temperament from 1847 to 1849 or 1851: we’ve seen traces of this, perhaps, in the historical
context underpinning the gaps between the setting and the composition and the publication of Middlemarch.
153
Risorgimento, it’s important to remember that Leopold II had much more direct ties to Florence
and to Tuscany, since he was born there. Like the poet, who identifies as a Florentine in spirit,
he both is and isn’t from this place, for his will always be Austrian by birth.
Before turning to Casa Guidi Windows, I'll discuss Barrett Browning’s advertisement,
which has determined the ways critics have come to understand the relationship between the first
and the second parts. Barrett Browning’s advertisement reminds us that this poem is a diptych,
and the diptych structure is central to her “truthful” representation (Casa Guidi Windows xli).118
Indeed, Casa Guidi Windows was published at a twofold remove from the events it narrates:
written two years after the events in the second part and four years after the events in the first
part, the 1851 advertisement suggests that ambivalence is central to the meaning of the poem as a
whole. For the Grand Duke’s and the Pope’s duplicities undermine the poet’s faith in a future
for the republic, which hadn’t yet been realized when she published her diptych in 1851. Barrett
Browning insists, in fact, that we can appreciate her poem as a “truthful” account, precisely
because she hasn’t revised the first part to anticipate the second. “The discrepancy between the
two parts is a sufficient guaranty to the public of the truthfulness of the writer, who,” Barrett
Browning confesses, “takes shame upon herself that she believed, like a woman, some royal
oaths, and lost sight of the probable consequences of some obvious popular defects” (xli). “If the
discrepancies should be painful to the reader,” she continues, “let him understand that to the
writer it has been more so” (xli). Barrett Browning doesn’t present herself to be flawless, and
she doesn’t pretend to have been a prophet when she composed each part of the diptych in 1847
and in 1849. Instead, her advertisement for the twofold poem shows how she misread the Pope
118
I quote from Markus’s critical edition of Casa Guidi Windows (The Browning Institute, 1977). Markus’s critical
edition is a composite of the 1851 and the 1856 editions, as well as three manuscripts of part one, which she labels
“Harvard A,” “Harvard B,” and “Yale.” Throughout her critical edition, she defers to the 1856 version since it is the
latest authoritative one, though she lists variants between the five texts in her appendix. When there are important
differences between the 1851 and the 1856 versions, I will note them.
154
and especially the Grand Duke. “Barrett Browning’s ‘Advertisement’ creates a third term of the
poem that is neither mythos nor logos, neither completely contained by the window frame nor
totally containing the scene it frames,” Harris argues; and this “privileged poetic middle space is
part history, part literary history, part letter home, part call to arms” (118). Barrett Browning’s
advertisement suggests that this in-betweenness is tantamount to truthfulness. The poet’s
ambivalence is, then, as important as the Duke’s, the Pope’s, and the Florentine people’s. For
the poet’s mistaken faith is humbling, and Casa Guidi Windows may be read as a warning to
mid-nineteenth-century readers about the dangers of immediate mythologization.119
Casa Guidi Windows may be disorienting, then, only insofar as it defies our expectations
for politicoaesthetic temperament in Barrett Browning’s late work. For just as the Risorgimento
and the Unification of Italy became, by the end of the century, a mythology—the Unification
was the inevitable consequence of the Risorgimento, and the Risorgimento was a linear, centurylong event unfolding from the First (1848) to the Third (1866) Wars for Italian Independence—
so Barrett Browning’s allegiances to Florence have been misremembered through a linear
narrative, metanarrative, and biocritical mythology. Barrett Browning’s contemporaries often
remember her as a spokeswoman for Italy who became more and more fervent between
September 1846, when she eloped with Robert Browning and left London for Paris, Pisa, and
119
Many readers have suggested that Barrett Browning’s distrust of mythologization in this poem is a response to
Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History (1837) and On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in
History (1841). For discussions of Carlyle’s influence on Barrett Browning, see Guiliana Artom Treves, Alethea
Hayter, Gilbert, Rosenblum, Deborah Phelps, Helen Groth, Isobel Armstrong, Richard Cronin, and Lindsey
Cordery. “At the core of the political vision of Casa Guidi Windows is the desire to find ‘the right’ secular
charismatic leader to galvanize the political will of the Italian populace,” Groth writes; it is, however, a desire
Barrett Browning abandons between parts one and two (39). For Phelps, the “hero worship in the first part of Casa
Guidi Windows” reveals Barrett Browning’s study of Carlyle during the 1830s and the 1840s; his ideas continued to
shape “her deeply emotional involvement with the Italian cause” over the next decade (227). “For Barrett
Browning, and for all like her who knew their Carlyle,” Cronin writes, “processions are a warning in themselves.
Descriptions of them punctuate Carlyle’s The French Revolution. They constitute the great set pieces of his history,
and always prompt his deep, fierce laughter, for what they offer is an idea of citizenship reduced to a mummery, an
empty masquerade, and they command the belief only of those who cannot see the people marching in the
procession for what they are, of those who can successfully repress any recognition of people in their gross, physical
individuality” (46).
155
finally Florence; and June 1861, when she died, in part, many intimate, because of her heartbreak
over the death of Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour.120 Accordingly, readers seem to expect
Barrett Browning’s Italian poems (one-by-one and collectively) to parallel her perceived
personal and political evolution: from disillusionment in England to enthusiasm in Italy during
1846–1847, and from renewed disillusionment in 1849, when the Grand Duke revoked his
support of the provisional Tuscan government to renewed enthusiasm in 1860, when the Grand
Duchy of Tuscany, the Duchy of Parma, the Duchy of Modena, and the Papal Legations joined
to form the United Provinces of Central Italy.
Critics often read Casa Guidi Windows as an intermediary between Sonnets from the
Portuguese (1850) and Aurora Leigh (1856) when they read it primarily as a meditation on
poetics, or as the first of three collections about Italy when they read it primarily as a meditation
on politics. The other two “political” collections, Poems before Congress (1860) and Last
Poems (1862, posthumous) were published nearly a decade after Casa Guidi Windows. Yet if we
read Casa Guidi Windows as a singular project in Barrett Browning’s canon, and not as the first
or the second work in a series with an inevitable conclusion, then her ambivalent representation
of mid-nineteenth-century Florence isn’t as unexpected as critics have suggested. For unlike
nineteenth-century assumptions about Poems before Congress or Last Poems, and, equally
importantly, unlike our mythologized understanding of Italianate Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi
Windows traces a poet’s real-time politicoaesthetic coming-of-age.
120
See, for instance, Treves, Hayter, Alaya, and Camus, whose assumption may be based on a letter from William
Wetmore Story to Charles Eliot Norton, dated 15 August 1861, just after Barrett Browning died. Henry James
quotes it in William Wetmore Story and His Friends: “‘We went immediately to Florence, and it was a sad house
enough. There stood the table with her letters and books as usual, and her little chair beside it, and in her portfolio a
half-finished letter to Mme. Mario, full of noble words about Italy. Yes, it was for Italy that her last words were
written; for her dear Italy were her last aspirations. The death of Cavour had greatly affected her. She had wept
many tears for him, and been a real mourner. This agitation undoubtedly weakened her and perhaps was the last
feather that broke her down” (64).
156
While we often think of Barrett Browning as the unwavering bard of the Risorgimento,
Casa Guidi Windows shows how her republican allegiances aren’t simply one-dimensional. Like
those of Margaret Fuller and Effie Ruskin (which I discuss in chapters one and five respectively),
the poet’s empathies aren’t determined exclusively by her faith in Austrians or in Italians.
Barrett Browning claims as much in her advertisement, where she writes that “her warm
affection for [this] beautiful and unfortunate country” demonstrates her “good faith” and her
“freedom from partisanship” (xli).121 Indeed, the poet’s mood shifts, not simply from
disillusionment to enthusiasm (what’s usually said about Barrett Browning from 1846 to 1861),
and not simply from enthusiasm to disillusionment (what’s usually said about Barrett
Browning’s poet between 1847 and 1849), but rather from one kind of ambivalence to another.
Barrett Browning’s representation of political sentiment is, consequently, much more tempered
than critics often suggest.122 In fact, Barrett Browning confesses her reservations about Leopold
II in the first part of the poem; in the second part, she professes her renewed faith that this
country will be liberated, not because of a Pope or a Grand Duke, but because it is God’s will.
The diptych structure is, then, crucial to the meaning of the poem, because it draws our
attention not just to what the poet saw in September 1847 and in May 1849, but also to how she
renders her “impressions” (Barrett Browning, Casa Guidi Windows xli). Barrett Browning does
trace a linear plot, because she outlines what happened on 12 September 1847 and on 2 May
1849. Yet Casa Guidi Windows is a meditation on pendular poetics and politics as much as it is
a firsthand account of 1847–1849 Florence published in two parts. Barrett Browning’s diptych
121
In the textual notes to her critical edition, Markus notes that this line changed slightly between the 1851 and the
1856 editions (Casa Guidi Windows 120). In 1856, the end of the first paragraph reads “from partisanship.” In
1851, however, it reads “from all partisanship.” The deletion of “all” may be subtle, but it shows how Barrett
Browning was, perhaps counter-intuitively, much more tempered about the betrayals in 1851 than she was in 1856
(or how she was defensive toward her British readership).
122
Markus and Harris are notable exceptions. Harris emphasizes Barrett Browning’s “somewhat doubtful
enthusiasm” in part one, while Markus traces her sustained faith in the Risorgimento (despite the fact that she is
distraught by the Pope’s and the Grand Duke’s betrayals) in part two (Harris 111; Markus xix).
157
draws attention to the non-linear plot she experiences inwardly when she witnesses the events of
these days through her windows. In her advertisement, she suggests that this poem traces “[n]o
continuous narrative nor exposition of political philosophy” (xli). “It is a simple story of
personal impressions,” Barrett Browning continues, and the “only value is in the intensity with
which they were received” (xli). Barrett Browning’s poem isn’t, then, just an historical or an
historiographical retelling of real events. It is a meditation on what the poet is thinking and
feeling when she experiences history firsthand.
Far from merely outlining what happened on 12 September 1847 and on 2 May 1849,
Barrett Browning’s diptych reminds us, often unnervingly, of symmetries, asymmetries, and
absences that become legible through the poet’s almost immediate hindsight. Schor reminds us
that “the processions of 1847 and 1849 have been read as mutually cancelling, suggesting
palinodic futility or quietism” (310). Yet this isn’t a poem about the futility of revolution, and
Barrett Browning remains optimistic through her own parallel moments “of vision and vehement
revision” (310). Ultimately, “the second narrative expressly reconfigures” the first (310). “By
its very structure,” Christopher Keirstead similarly writes, Casa Guidi Windows, “replicates just
how unstable the nation can be, especially when still in its formative stages. Italy appears in
moments of vision that political events alternately confirm and deny” (73). Harris argues that
this poem resists “a purely linear telling of these moments in Italy’s history,” because the
advertisement “makes the reader read” both parts one and two “through its prophetic outcome”
(118).123 It is, Harris continues, “a conclusion that is not a conclusion, a definite indefinite
ending, because Italy’s liberated future has not yet been realized” (118). As we’ve seen in
123
Harris shows how “Barrett Browning inscribes the process of Italy’s transition from geographic expression to
nation through the poem’s own chronology and datedness” (118). “Barrett Browning’s experience in Tuscany from
1847 to 1851 does not simply chronicle a sequence of events,” Harris continues; rather, “Parts 1 and 2 create a nonlinear narrative when read through Barrett Browning’s prefatory remarks in the ‘Advertisement,’ which present
them as a constellation of events that the ‘present’ time (1851) has formed with the earlier moment (1847)” (118).
158
chapters one and two, the storylines in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860) and
George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) provide an internal logic for the characters’
relationships with one another; however, these characters still struggle to reckon their presenttense experiences with pasts and futures that are becoming more and more illegible; we’ll see
this pattern continue in chapter six, when I turn to Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima
(1886). Likewise, because we read the “political events” of Casa Guidi Windows non-linearly or
circularly, and necessarily through the poet’s backward-glancing perspective, 1848 is present
(but only implicitly present) between parts one and two of this poem. 1848 remains, in fact,
largely unnarrated.
It’s common for Barrett Browning scholars to dub the poem a diptych, while glossing the
personal and political storylines that unfold across Casa Guidi Windows.124 While scholars often
remind us of this twofold exposition, the structure of the poem seems relevant only insofar as it
helps them to abbreviate what happens in parts one and two. In fact, most readings open as this
one does, with a shorthand version of the events Barrett Browning witnessed on 12 September
and 2 May, but turn quickly to a claim about the necessary connection, or the necessary
disconnection, implicit in Barrett Browning’s decision to place the two moments in conversation
with one another; most readings, then, turn either to part one or to part two, and emphasize either
poetics or politics.125 Treves is the first to read Casa Guidi Windows along these lines: “It is a
124
Treves, Hayter, Markus, Gilbert, Rosenblum, Leighton, Dillon and Frank, Lewis, Schor, Groth, Harris,
Chapman, Cronin, Keirstead, Camus, and Cordery all discuss the poem’s twofold structure, at least in passing.
125
Jean Lewis reminds us that readings of Casa Guidi Windows often focus attention on part one or on part two,
and critics rarely put the two parts in sustained conversation with one another. “It is indeed tempting to read Barrett
Browning’s political poetry as confident,” Lewis writes, “especially to critics struggling to secure Barrett
Browning’s place in the canon of English literature” (160). Yet Lewis urges us to read Casa Guidi Windows
differently from the ways we read Poems before Congress and Last Poems, even though all three books are about
the Italian Question. For this diptych isn’t as “confident” as Poems before Congress and Last Poems, not just
because Barrett Browning’s polticoaesthetic allegiances to Italy were still nascent between 1847 and 1851, but also
because the futures of Florence and of Italy much more generally were still uncertain during this period. “The
difficulty with some of the recent criticism is that while it skillfully argues for Barrett Browning’s confidence in her
159
poem in blank verse and there is a ‘fracture’ between the first half” and “the second” (76).
“Salvation lay in the individual,” Hayter similarly writes: “that was the unifying idea behind her
often inconsistent-seeming political theory” (123). Within the logic of the poem, Hayter
continues, parts one and two are only reconcilable when the poet turns from the Grand Duke and
from the Pope to God.
Since 1956, Barrett Browning scholars have continued to invoke the structure of the
poem as a shorthand for elucidating their disparate critical ends. Rosenblum, Leighton, Groth,
and Chapman read Casa Guidi Windows though the “double vision” that develops across the first
and the second parts, and they connect the window-gazing speaker’s “double vision” to Aurora
Leigh’s ars poetica. Aurora Leigh calls for poets to “Exert a double vision”: they “should have
eyes / to see near things as comprehensively / As if afar they took their point of sight,” as well as
“distant things as intimately deep / As if they touched them” (V: 184–188). Likewise, Camus
traces a “double curve” in the letters Barrett Browning wrote between 1847 and 1849 as she was
drafting the first and the second parts of Casa Guidi Windows. Camus compares Barrett
Browning’s wavering faith in the Grand Duke and the Pope across her correspondence to the
“contradictions” we can trace between parts one and two (228). Similarly, in her study of the
poetics and the politics of sensibility, Chapman terms Casa Guidi Windows a “bifurcated” and a
“bi-focal” poem (272, 275).
politics, it suggests that that confidence bleeds over into a confidence in her aesthetics, which in the case of Casa
Guidi Windows, is a questionable tenet.” (160–161). Lewis critiques readings of Casa Guidi Windows that prioritize
part one over part two and that prioritize poetics over politics. Perhaps because part one is often read as a
meditation on poetical and political authority, and part two is often read as a confession of disillusionment, many
feminist scholars (including Sandra Gilbert and Dorothy Mermin among other second-wave feminist critics) seem
reluctant to discuss the end of the poem. Casa Guidi Windows, Lewis asseverates, “is more complex than a
statement of Barrett Browning’s confidence in her feminine poetic voice. Such a limited critical conclusion does a
disservice to Barrett Browning in that it suggests a woman poet cannot be ‘good’ unless she is confident in
integrating her identity as a poet and woman. It further suggests that to struggle with this duality is a sign of failure
and immaturity. Casa Guidi Windows, however, suggests something deeper about the development of the Victorian
woman poet. It suggests that this ambivalence and struggle may be signs of a fully aware and talented woman poet
in a patriarchal tradition” (174).
160
These labels are telling, for they suggest that we share certain assumptions when we gloss
this poem as a diptych and when we emphasize the “discrepancy” between the first and the
second parts as a meaningful poetic and metapoetic preoccupation, not just as a shorthand for
Barrett Browning’s storylines. Those who read Casa Guidi Windows as a double vision, a
double curve, or a double poem often conclude that this doubleness means Barrett Browning’s
faith in the Risorgimento is defined by one of two opposing moods: enthusiasm or
disillusionment. Yet the fact that this poem appears as a diptych suggests Barrett Browning’s
allegiances to the Duke, to the Pope, and to the Florentine people aren’t expressed fully either in
the first or the second parts alone. Indeed, the “‘fracture’” is important, because it suggests that
disappointed reconciliations are as crucial as the endings we witness in part and in part two. For
if we extend Aurora Leigh’s ars poetica to Casa Guidi Windows (as Rosenblum, Leighton,
Groth, and Chapman suggestively propose), then the structure of the poem reveals it to be a
serious mediation on ambivalence and on historic/historiographic representation much more than
it is a “‘fracture’” (Treves 76).
In her recent chapter about Casa Guidi Windows, Armstrong calls it a “two-part poem,”
but as Cronin reminds us, Armstrong’s famous definition of the “double poem” in Victorian
Poetry may be much more useful if we want to understand how the structure of Casa Guidi
Windows is central to its tone (Armstrong, Casa Guidi Windows 52; Cronin 41–42).126
126
While Cronin (via Armstrong) reads Casa Guidi Windows as a double poem, he assumes that parts one and two
often exist in ironic juxtaposition to one another. Cronin reads Casa Guidi Windows within a nineteenth-century
tradition (and it’s a nineteenth-century tradition dominated by men) that traces ironic relationships “between the two
aspects of their poems, and one result of this is that an interest in politics is almost always subordinated to an interest
in character” (41–42). “It is a poem in which Barrett Browning is much concerned with her own place in literary
history,” Cronin writes,” and hence it is appropriate that she should have borrowed this structure from the first major
political poem in English written by a woman, Charlotte Smith’s The Emigrants (1793), but it is still more important
that the structure enables Barrett Browning to present her meditation on Italian nationalism dramatically” (42). For
Cronin, the double poem is almost synonymous with Anglo-Italian representations of the Risorgimento: “Clough’s
Amours de Voyage (1849), for example, describes the thwarted Roman revolution that immediately preceded the
Florentine revolution of Casa Guidi Windows, but for Clough the Roman Republic functions most importantly as a
161
Armstrong’s definition of the double poem shows how mid-century poetics and politics often
informed one another—formally—through their twofold exposition. Most simply, Armstrong
defines the double poem as “two poems in one” (Victorian Poetry 16). The double poem
inspires in the poet, and in the poet’s readers, a “systematic exploration of ambiguity” (16). It
belongs” Armstrong continues, “to a post-teleological, post-revolutionary, post-industrial and
post-Kantian world and its interrelated manifestations” (16).127 Through the double structure, the
poet asks us to contend with the piece—the first half, the second half, and the work as a whole—
not merely as readers but, much more importantly, as interpreters. For as Armstrong reminds us,
the double poem emerges at a moment when Victorian poets and readers were beginning to
upend teleological worldviews: their faith in inevitable resolutions, especially inevitable
resolutions that depend on heavenly power, was shattered by mid-century. Though Barrett
Browning does, ultimately, turn to God by the end of the poem as the only hope for a future
Florence or a future Italy, Armstrong’s discussion of skepticism is especially useful to my
means through which Claude, the English tourist, reveals and discovers his authentic and inauthentic selfhood” (42).
“Casa Guidi Windows, too, is flecked with irony,” Cronin continues, “but Barrett Browning never fixes the poem
within an ironic mode, and in consequence the personality of the speaker never displaces the stumbling advance of
Italy towards nationhood from the centre of the poem’s concerns” (42). For many readers, Barrett Browning’s
advertisement is the part of the poem that is most “flecked with irony.” While the appositive “like a woman” is
tongue-in-cheek, the “discrepancy” isn’t, for the first and the second parts of this poem aren’t in ironic
juxtaposition—and that is the source of the poet’s pain. Just because one part of one sentence (in the advertisement
or in the poem proper) is ironic doesn’t mean the rest is: that is why this poem is so slippery.
127
For as Armstrong argues, the “double reading” required by the “double poem” “inevitably dissolves such fixity,
just as it means a shift from ontology to epistemology, a shift from investigating the grounds of being to a sceptical
interrogation of the grounds of knowledge, which becomes phenomenology, not belief. In a post-revolutionary
world in which power is supposedly vested in many rather than a privileged class, the double poem dramatizes
relationships of power” (16). “In the twofold reading,” Armstrong continues, “struggle is structurally necessary and
becomes the organising principle, as critique successively challenges and redefines critique” (16). The twofold
“structure inevitably draws attention to the act of interpretation,” both the poet’s and the reader’s, “since one reading
encounters another and moves to a new content in the process. Hermeneutic self-consciousness leads in its turn to
concentration on the nature of representation, for if interpretation is in question as a construct, so also are the
categories of thought it deals with” (17). Ultimately, these double poems are representative of “Victorian poems”
much more generally, since the structure asks us to be “sceptical and affirmative simultaneously” (17). When the
reader assumes the poet’s consciousness, by putting the first and the second halves in conversation with one another,
she “participate[s] in the struggle of the lyric voice”; she is, then, “compelled to be internal to the poem’s
contradictions and recomposes the poem’s processes in the act of comprehending them as ideological struggle” (17).
In Casa Guidi Windows, this process is redoubled, since the poet must make sense of the Grand Duke’s and the
Pope’s duplicitous ideologies; Barrett Browning’s poem, in turn, asks us to make sense of her necessarily twofold
ideologies between the two historic dates: 12 September 1847 and 2 May 1849.
162
discussion of ambivalence in Casa Guidi Windows. For if, as Armstrong argues, the double
poem is quintessential Victoriana, then Barrett Browning’s ambivalence is representative of the
mood of the period.128
In the first half of part one, Barrett Browning’s poet distinguishes herself from Florentine
histories and literary histories, and she yearns to be the voice who speaks on behalf of a future
Italy. Yet the plot of the first part (the newly formed militia’s procession, which we anticipate
even in the four-hundred-line prelude) is, in fact, something she witnessed a “few weeks back”
(Casa Guidi Windows I: 446). Casa Guidi Windows opens with a discontinuous sense of
immediacy, then, much like the Rome chapters of Middlemarch. For just as Eliot dislocates us
from Middlemarch to Rome through a catalogue of civic leaders (the mayor, the king, and the
prime minister) and shifts from a present-tense narrative (chapter 19) to a flashback (chapter 20)
and from the flashback back to the present and the future (chapters 21 and 22), so Barrett
Browning frames our first encounter with Leopold II though a backward glance.129 While the
128
As we’ll see, this twofold structure characterizes many Risorgimento and post-Risorgimento texts, and it renders
legible the sense of ambivalence that defined the second half of the nineteenth century for many Anglo-American
expatriates. Barrett Browning’s diptych parallels Effie Ruskin’s two Venetian sojourns in 1849–1850 and in 1851–
1852. Ruskin’s letters trace her torn allegiances to Venetians and to Austrians in the immediate wake of 1848. The
sense of dislocation Barrett Browning conveys while looking through the windows of Casa Guidi during two very
different processions also anticipates the outward-looking—yet compressedly interior—sensibility in Eliot’s lessthan-single volume study of Rome in Middlemarch and James’s less-than-single chapter study of Venice in The
Princess Casamassima.
129
Just as the romantic and the historic plots of Middlemarch are, for many readers, bound up with one another,
biocritical synopses of Casa Guidi Windows often remind us that this date holds personal and political significance
for the Brownings: the Grand Duke’s promise to the Florentine people on 12 September 1847 also marked the
Brownings’ first wedding anniversary. As we’ll see in chapter five, when we turn to John and Effie Ruskin’s
delayed Venetian honeymoon, elisions between personal and political events can be quite damaging for a writer’s
(especially a woman writer’s) reputation. For when we read a political turning point as a shorthand for a personal
turning point, we intimate hasty connections between the two. For instance, Hayter writes that Barrett Browning
“followed with sympathy and hope the liberalizing events of the autumn of 1847—the formation of a civic guard in
Florence with the Grand Duke’s permission, the procession to celebrate it which she watched from the windows of
Casa Guidi on her wedding anniversary, the grant of a constitution for Tuscany” (131). “As usual,” Hayter
continues, “she believed too easily in the Grand Duke Leopold’s single-minded good intentions” (Hayter 131).
Hayter’s suggestion that this misplaced faith in the Grand Duke doesn’t, perhaps, make sense, unless we read it as a
tacit judgement on Barrett Browning’s relationships with her husband and with her father. Gilbert extends Hayter’s
logic in famous essay, where she argues that this poem traces Barrett Browning’s turn from a “patria” to a “matria.”
While Barrett Browning critics are much more skeptical of the matria-patria argument now than they were a decade
163
poet gazed from the Casa Guidi toward the Palazzo Pitti, where Leopold II watched with his wife
and his children, he gazed back across the piazza at the militia and, perhaps inadvertently, at
her.130 Because we see the unfolding procession alongside the poet and through the window
frame, their gazes seem to mirror one another at this particular moment (if only because our
perspective of him is filtered through her); and their intersecting gazes become our focal point.
During this crucial moment, Barrett Browning fixes our attention midway between sky and street
and midway between the Casa Guidi and the Palazzo Pitti, so that we are suspended just above
the piazza, where the Florentine civic guard is marching closer and closer into our field of vision.
Yet even as the poet anticipates the presence of the militia crossing our imagined
vanishing point between the Palazzo Pitti and the Casa Guidi, she hesitates and asks her readers
whether she should confess what she saw: “Shall I say / What made my heart beat with exulting
love, / A few weeks back?—” (I: 444–446). While she reminds us that this event took place a
“few weeks back,” her description reveals a sustained present-tense sensibility. It’s clear, then,
that this poem isn’t just about the present or the future. It’s also about a recent past she’s trying
to make legible to herself, and to us, through a vicarious sense of immediacy.131 Barrett
Browning pauses and follows the question mark and the dash with an elliptical panorama:
ago, seemingly unrelated references to the Brownings’ anniversary persist in readings of Casa Guidi Windows. “The
procession lasted for three hours, and forty thousand people converged on Florence,” Armstrong writes; it “took
place on the Brownings’ wedding anniversary and for them presaged a nascent republicanism that challenged
England’s backward monarchical state” (Armstrong, Casa Guidi Windows 51). For a thorough discussion of our
misunderstandings of the Browning marriage, see Alaya, whose authoritative essay shows how we often exaggerate
their personal and their political differences through such faulty superimpositions.
130
Markus reminds us that this view isn’t actually from the Brownings’ apartment in the Palazzo Guidi. In fact, the
Brownings “watched the procession from the front” not the side windows, since their windows overlooked a
sidestreet (Casa Guidi Windows 83). “‘We went to a window in our palazzo which had a full view,’” Barrett
Browning writes in a letter to her sister Henrietta in mid-September 1847; “‘and I had a throne of cushions piled up
on a chair . . . . and then Robert & I waved our handkerchiefs till my wrist ached, I will answer for mine’” (83).
131
The poet’s representation is, then, an epistemological self-portrait as much as it is an historical or
historiographical record. Barrett Browning’s insistently fractured temporality (the moment is both past and present)
anticipates the kind of impressionism that we often associate with Joseph Conrad: this is what Ian Watt terms
“delayed decoding” in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (175–176). For though the procession unfolds linearly as
the people march (quite scriptedly from higher to lower classes) through the piazza, we are jolted into the poet’s line
164
. . . . The day was such a day
As Florence owes the sun. The sky above,
Its weight upon the mountains seemed to lay,
And palpitate in glory, like a dove
Who has flown too fast, full-hearted!—take away
The image! for the heart of man beat higher
That day in Florence, flooding all her streets
And piazzas with a tumult and desire.
The people, with accumulated heats,
And faces turned one way, as if one fire
Both drew and flushed them, left their ancient beats,
And went up toward the palace-Pitti wall,
To thank their Grand-duke, who, not quite of course,
Had graciously permitted, at their call,
The citizens to use their civic force
To guard their civic homes.132 (I: 446–461)
In her early versions of Casa Guidi Windows, Barrett Browning exaggerates the poet’s
meditation on temporality through a mid-line verse-paragraph break between the dash and the
ellipses; the Harvard B and the Yale manuscripts, as well as the 1851 edition, break with the
poet’s interrogative, stressing a shift from poetics to politics to come after the ellipsis (Markus
of vision, and we must make sense of what she sees alongside her—in our real-time though it may be narrative
hindsight.
132
“The formation of the Civic Guard, the “Guardia Civica” or militia, allowed Tuscans to bear arms to protect their
property” (Markus, Casa Guidi Windows 83). The people Barrett Browning’s poet sees on 12 September 1847 have
assembled before the Florentine Civic guard and before the Grand Duke to thank him. Like the Florentine people,
Barrett Browning assumed, as Romans had just months before, that this “liberality” was a promise for eventual selfrule: they hoped it “would lead to a constitution and to the unification of Italy” (xv).
165
124). Barrett Browning’s break (through the punctuation alone or redoubled through the
caesura) draws our attention to the poet’s impressionism, which blurs both chronological and
geographical or spatial dimensions.
In this passage, the poet looks outward, from the front windows of her home to what
appears (at first at least) to be a picturesque Tuscan vista; but she narrows our attention more and
more closely downward, and then she directs our gaze toward the crowds gathered between the
Casa Guidi and the Palazzo Pitti. The poet’s self-consciousness about her scope—she sees
through the frames of the windows—is important, because it focuses our attention on the “double
vision” she has come to picture in her few-weeks’ hindsight. Like Aurora Leigh, she does
appear, at least in her mind’s eye, “to see near things as comprehensively / As if afar they took
their point of sight”; and she tries to imagine “distant things” felt by the Florentine people in the
street “as intimately deep / as if they touched” her personally (Aurora Leigh V: 184–188).
Indeed, if Casa Guidi Windows anticipates Aurora Leigh’s ars poetica, then it does so not only
through the inverse processions that unfold across parts one and two but also, and perhaps much
more importantly, though moments like this, when the poet imagines the Florentine people’s
perspectives (even with their “faces turned one way,” that is, from the Casa Guidi and toward the
Palazzo Pitti) as extensions of her own (Casa Guidi Windows I: 455). Once she has fixed our
attention on the Florentine people, she describes her empathetic patriotism through what Schor
might term “palidonic” interiorities. When she remembers watching the Florentine people, she
imagines what they were thinking and feeling; in turn, and in hindsight, she articulates what she
really saw and what she really was thinking and feeling on 12 September 1847: the hope that
“this new good” would be “presageful of more good” (I: 463–464). The poet’s superimpositions
between outward and inward gazes (both her impressions and her assumptions about the
166
Florentine people’s impressions) and between past- and present-tense perspectives are subtle; yet
they are important, because they have become inseparable from one another. By the end of this
passage, it’s clear that she remembers the Florentine people’s present-tense impressions as facts
that inflect her representation of the few-weeks’ flashback.
Our perspective is guided—almost simultaneously—both by the poet’s darting glance
from the sky to the street and by the clarifying hindsight of her mind’s eye. We witness the
procession as a composite of her present- and past-tense points of view. We also witness it
through her kaleidoscopic flashes between exterior and interior worlds, so that she appears in
proto-Baudelairean isolation within the crowd, even as she watches from above. Yet Barrett
Browning’s poet isn’t a prefiguration of Baudelaire’s modern painter (“The Painter of Modern
Life” wasn’t published until 1863). For though the two seem separated by less than a decade in
this moment, Baudelaire’s painter is a pedestrian among the Parisian crowd, while Barrett
Browning’s poet remains still and apart from the Florentine people. It’s telling, though, that
Barrett Browning calls Casa Guidi Windows a “story of personal impressions” in the
advertisement, because her politicoaesthetic landscape does, in many ways, anticipate the
representational revolutions of the 1860s and the 1870s (xli). Indeed, if we read this poem
alongside Italian (rather than French) impressionist or proto-impressionist paintings, then we
may be better able to understand how and why the poet’s vantage point is empathetically
patriotic, not just voyeuristic.133
As we learned in chapter one, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and Telemaco Signorini
were among the Macchiaioli, a group of mid-century republican painters from Florence whose
iconic portraits of the Roman guardia civica, the Florentine guardia civica, and the French
133
For discussions about Barrett Browning’s patriotic or voyeuristic spectatorship, see especially Schor, Cronin,
Keirstead, and Moine.
167
soldati transformed much more traditional representations of central Italian landscapes.134 Just
as Fattori draws our attention from the horizon to a line of vaguely defined soldiers in French
Soldiers of ’59, so Barrett Browning shifts our attention from the picturesque Tuscan vista to the
crowds below through her description of the procession approaching closer and closer from our
vanishing point between the Casa Guidi and the Palazzo Pitti to the spot right beneath her
windows. For if we read this part of the poem as macchiaesque (it is both a landscape and a
portrait of the newly formed militia, and lines 446–576 list an almost pointillist catalogue of the
faces within the crowds), then it may be easier to understand how her avant-garde exposition is
inseparable from her politicoaesthetic critique.
While Fattori’s critique of the French soldati lies in his impressionist or pointillist
representations of their idle bodies, their facelessness also reminds us of their impersonality and
their omnipresence throughout central Italy during the 1850s and the 1860s. Barrett Browning’s
description of the 12 September procession relies on similar visual tropes. In Casa Guidi
Windows, however, the Florentine people are the subject of a critique, even if it is a measured
critique. To be sure, Barrett Browning’s poet praises the Grand Duke’s decision to grant a
Florentine civic guard throughout the first part of Casa Guidi Windows, but the fact that this is
cause for celebration intimates just how far Leopold II is from Barrett Browning’s conception of
a good ruler. Indeed, she already realizes in her two-weeks’ hindsight that the “order” she
witnesses during this procession might not translate to real changes in Florence or in other
Tuscan cities where parallel crowds assembled throughout September and October 1847 (1:
471). Barrett Browning’s poet marks the beginning of the procession with what is to become her
poetic refrain: she gazes out
134
For a fuller discussion of the important differences between the Italian Macchiaoli and the French
Impressionists, see chapter one.
168
From Casa Guidi windows, while, in trains
Of orderly procession—banners raised,
And intermittent burst of martial strains
Which died upon the shout, as if amazed
By gladness beyond music—they passed on!
The Magistracy, with insignia, passed,—
And all the people shouted in the sun,
And all the thousand windows which had cast
A ripple of silks, in blue and scarlet, down,
(As if the houses overflowed at last,)
Seemed growing larger with fair heads and eyes. (I: 470–481)
In the next forty lines, the poet lists the people who follow “the Magistracy”: “the Lawyers”;
“the Priesthood”; “the Artists”; “the Trades”; “the People” (“IL POPOLO,— / The word means
dukedom, empire, majesty, / And kings in such an hour might read it so”); the “representatives arow” of “every state of Tuscany” (Siena, Massa, Pienza, Arezzo, and Florence); and, finally,
“the various children” sent by “the world” (“Greeks, English, French—as if to a parliament / Of
lovers of her Italy in ranks, / Each bearing its land’s symbol reverent”) (I: 476, 482, 485, 496,
499–501, 503–504, 512, 513–515). Beneath the poet’s professed enthusiasm, there’s an eerie
tension between the insistently orderly lines (both her words and the rows of people she saw) and
her periodic references to their quick turns in faith.
For as Markus reminds us, on 12 September, “all of Italy seemed to agree to forget that
the nickname for the ‘gran duca’ (Grand Duke) was ‘gran ciuco’ (Grand Ass)” (Introduction
169
xxviii).135 Just as Fattori’s re-envisioned Tuscan landscapes are tantamount to patriotic rallying
cries, since the foreign soldiers who appear in isolation or in formation with one another are
often detached from their surroundings, so Barrett Browning’s macchiaesque vision of the 12
September procession may be read as a meditation on the Grand Duke’s hesitance. Framed
through the windows of Casa Guidi, the poet may seem to be a foreign spectator to this historic
moment; however, her double consciousness (she does and doesn’t identify with the Florentine
people) shows how her critique transcends the tourist’s, the traveller’s, or the expatriate’s.
Instead, she sees comes to understand the difficulties of her historic moment with the subtlety of
a Fattori or a Lega or a Signorini. For we haven’t yet witnessed the appearance of the Florentine
guardia civica; and while we witness a magnificent display of the momentary trappings of a
soon-to-be republic (the “banners,” the “silks, in blue and scarlet,” and the “martial strains”), the
republic is still unrealized.
Yet the poet’s critique of the Florentine people is, ultimately, a critique of the Grand
Duke, since she believes that this procession reveals their blind faith in his support of a Tuscan
republic independent of Austrian rule. Their gratitude for so little condemns him already for his
present and future rule, if not his past. Ironically, many readers accuse the poet of misreading
Leopold II when they interpret the break between parts one and two in terms of her newly
realized naïveté.136 Markus, in contradistinction, argues that “when one turns away both from
her letters” and from her advertisement, “and reads the poem itself, one realizes that her
description” of the Grand Duke “is, in fact, informed with reservations” and that these
135
“Thomas Trollope,” Markus continues, “the editor of the paper that constantly praised [Leopold II] in 1847–48,
was to remember in the 1880s that the man he had earlier called ‘a wise and generous prince’ was ‘certainly not a
great or a wise man. He was one of those men of whom their friends habitually say that they are ‘no fools,’ or ‘not
such fools as they look.’ . . . He was not such a fool as he looked, for his appearance was certainly not that of a wise
or even an intelligent man’” (Introduction xxviii).
136
See, for instance, Treves, Hayter, and Dillon and Frank.
170
reservations “date from as early as the first part of Casa Guidi Windows” (Introduction xxvi,
xxviii). Furthermore, these reservations “are not obliterated as much as held in abeyance by the
joy of the hour,” Markus continues, since Barrett Browning “hoped at first that a limited man’s
good intentions were single-minded, rather than unequivocally believing them to be so. […]
When she blames herself for the limitations of her own vision, she is consciously representative
too of the liberal opinion of her time” (Introduction xxviii–xxix). In fact, the poet reveals herself
to be suspicious of Leopold II as early as the line 458, the very first time when he is named.
Indeed the poet damns Leopold II under her breath even as she remembers watching the
Florentine people enter the Piazza de’ Pitti
To thank their Grand-duke, who, not quite of course,
Had graciously permitted, at their call,
The citizens to use their civic force
To guard their civic homes. (I: 458–461)
Barrett Browning’s appositive “who, not quite of course,” undermines the rest of the sentence.
The fact that this tongue-in-cheek dismissal seems so surefooted makes the pomp of the
procession appear all the more naïve. In this context, the word “graciously” must be equally
tongue-in-cheek, and it suggests that she doesn’t believe the Florentine people should require his
permission to protect themselves. Indeed, the other appositive, “at their call,” suggests that he
only grants them this self-protection because they demand it.
In fact, toward the end of the procession, she dilates on the effective meaninglessness of
the Grand Duke’s promise, but her critique is euphemistic, and it removes us to a past nearly five
hundred years before the present moment. To be sure, the poet celebrates the promise of 12
September, but she sees a future republic as a promise from God, not from the Grand Duke. “O
171
heaven,” she cries, “I think that day had noble use / Among God’s days. So near stood Right and
Law, / Both mutually foreborne!” (I: 537–539). Yet she turns quickly from thanking God for
the “Right” and the “Law” that this day might represent to damning the Grand Duke for his
duplicitous allegiances. Barrett Browning’s poet anticipates that this moment will prove
Leopold II to be a sham:
And if, ne’ertheless,
That good day’s sun delivered to the vines
No charta, and the liberal Duke’s excess
Did scarce exceed a Guelf’s or Ghibelline’s
In any special actual righteousness
Of what that day he granted, still the signs
Are good and full of promise, we must say,
When multitudes approach their kings with prayers
And kings concede their people’s right to pray,
Both in one sunshine. (I: 541–550)
Perhaps the most striking part of this passage is that the poet assumes the Grand Duke’s promise
isn’t really a promise because there’s “no charta.” In fact, the Florentine people weren’t granted
the Right and the Law of a constitution until February 1848, and this year remains unnarrated
both in the first and in the second parts of Casa Guidi Windows.137 Even in this
uncharacteristically forgiving moment, she affirms her belief that God, not Leopold II, will help
the Florentine people to realize an independent nation-state. Barrett Browning’s syntax
exaggerates the poet’s suspicion that the Leopold II will prolong Austrian, not Italian, rule: the
137
Barrett Browning included an author’s note in her 1851 edition, but she deleted it in 1856. The note reads:
“Since then the constitutional concessions have been complete in Tuscany, as all the world knows. The event breaks
in upon the meditation, and is too fast for prophecy in these strange times.—E. B. B.” (Casa Guidi Windows 125).
172
suspended “if” in the first six lines of this sentence is, finally, answered by God’s “still” (I: 541,
546). Long before he could forestall the possibility for a constitution or for a republic, then, she
anticipates his cowardice.
Barrett Browning’s allusion to the Guelfs and Ghibellines may be subtle, but it is
important, since it connects the Grand Duke’s torn allegiances to Tuscans and to Austrians with a
much longer history of opposing Florentine factions. Ultimately, the power of the allusion rests
on what remains understood but unnarrated: the source of the Guelfs’ and Ghibellines’ feud.
During the twelfth century, these two lines became divided over their support of the Pope and of
the Holy Roman Emperor respectively; this division affected the relationships between the
Catholic Church and the governments in central and in northern Italy for the rest of the
millennium. Since then, the word “Guelf” has become a euphemism for papal apologists and the
word “Ghibelline” for imperial apologists (Gilmour 59–63). While Barrett Browning doesn’t
overtly articulate her belief that Leopold II would betray the Florentine people if Pius IX or
Franz Joseph I were to demand the Austrian army’s authority over the Florentine civic guard, she
does outline his duplicitous character through this comparison.
In The History of the Papal States from their Origin to the Present Day (1850), John
Miley explains the half-a-millennium feud between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines to a midcentury British readership by comparing them to the feud between Normans and Saxons,
between England and Ireland, and (though he doesn’t map these as clearly as the other two)
between Whigs and Tories. For Miley, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines embody the sustained
conflict that has defined Tuscany for well over the last five hundred years:
Whoever, in treating of the history of England, should make light of the two great
parties that rule this empire, merely because their designations of Whigs and
173
Tories are involved in some obscurity as to their origin, and are not remarkably
significant or dignified, as to their import, would prove himself but ill-qualified
for his task. No less so would he be for his, who, in treating of Italian history,
would dispatch the Guelphs and the Ghibellines with the cavalier remark, that
they were two mad-cap factions, who, from sheer delight in bloodshed and
rioting, were no sooner separated in Milan, than they began in Bologna, slashing
with swords, stabbing with daggers, besieging in slaughtering each other on every
available opportunity, through the length and breadth of the fair land; by turns
raising each other’s homes to the ground, confiscating each other’s property—the
victors never omitting to drive out the vanquished into exile; and all this, forsooth,
because one set had a whim to shout, ‘Webling’ or ‘Ghibling,’ and the other to lift
the countershout of ‘Guelph’ or ‘Welph,’ when reciprocally rushing to the charge.
[…] It is sculptured in high relief on the records of Italian history, that what the
Normans were in England from the eleventh century to the fifteenth, that what the
British have been in Ireland for seven centuries of conflict almost without a truce,
but not without a meaning or a motive, the Ghibellines were in Italy; and that
what the Saxons were for several ages, and what the Irish, alas! seemed doomed
to be for ever, the Guelphs were long made to feel they were—A CONQUERED
PEOPLE.
(337–338)
Miley’s sensational analogies are important, for they remind us that in 1851, Barrett Browning’s
characterization of Leopold II as the successor to the Guelf’s and Ghibelline’s “excess” would
have been fraught with this rather gruesome history. Moreover, if Barrett Browning’s and
Miley’s readers were as familiar as he says they should be with the warring factions across the
174
Italian Peninsula, then it might not have been unusual for them to draw the same parallels to the
warring factions between the British Isles. Miley’s final line on the Guelfs and the Ghibellines
may be the most illuminating one for our reading of Casa Guidi Windows, since it shows how
Barrett Browning intimates the Grand Duke’s duplicitous allegiances. Through her midprocession historical aside, she suggests that Leopold II extends a history of Guelf and
Ghibelline “excess.” Indeed, the Grand Duke identifies both with the conquered, the Tuscans,
and with the conquering, the Austrians.
Still, the poet suggests that if the Grand Duke remains loyal to Tuscans, and not to
Austrians, then he might prove himself to be as good as the Florentine people hope he is, at least
in this moment. “When men from humble homes and ducal chairs, / Hate wrong together,” the
poet reasons, they will always empathize with Tuscans, not with Austrians (I: 552–553). By
pairing the Florentine people with the Grand Duke (who appears as a plural title), the poet
intimates that the Florentine-born Austrian nobleman and the people may be likeminded in
counter-intuitive ways. While the poet syllogizes that Leopold II would never “dismay” his
Tuscan allegiances, even if Franz Joseph I was to remind him of his Austrian “royal claims,” this
seems unlikely (I: 551). By the end of the procession narrative, then, the poet’s faith in Leopold
II is, at best, self-consciously provisional: it is, then, a moment of identification with the
Florentine people, above all, and of willed ambivalence. In fact, weeks afterward, she’s still
trying to convince herself that this single promise will lead to a future for the republic. Just
before turning from the Piazza de’ Pitti to the Palazzo Pitti, and, thus, from the Florentine people
to the Grand Duke himself, the poet pictures the tri-color banners being “ruffled” rather
triumphantly “in the ruler’s face” (I: 554):
175
It was well to view
Those banners ruffled in a ruler’s face
Inscribed, “Live freedom, union, and all true
Brave patriots who are aided by God’s grace!” (I: 553–556)
Barrett Browning’s description of the moment when the Grand Duke faces the Florentine people
isn’t an unfiltered representation of what the poet saw firsthand in this moment. Instead it is a
portrait of the man that is colored by what she knows of his past and what she suspects of his
future duplicities. From the poet’s perspective, it’s still unclear whether Leopold II truly wants
to help the Florentine people realize “freedom” and “union”; and in hindsight, or in interpretive
hindsight, the poet sees the “ruffled” “banners” as emblems of the authority she hopes the
Florentine civic guard will claim by fighting for a constitution and a republic. Ultimately, the
banners render the Florentine people’s prayers undeniably legible to Leopold II; and the poet
remembers this moment as a potential turning point, both for the Grand Duke and for the
Florentine people. The face-to-face encounter she describes envisions both parties’ potential to
act on behalf of Tuscany: if the Grand Duke fulfills his promise for a civic guard by granting a
constitution and a republic, and if the Florentine people really do defend themselves, then they
will finally realize the “freedom” and the “union” inscribed on these fluttering banners.
The description of the Grand Duke’s face being obscured by the “ruffled” “banners” may
be a subtle example of the ways the poet envisions, re-envisions, and even dramatizes this
historical moment. The passage that immediately follows, however, takes even greater
subjective liberties. Rather than seeing the end of the procession (we don’t see the crowds
dissipate), we see Leopold II with his wife and his children looking back toward the Florentine
people and, presumably, toward the poet through the windows of the Palazzo Pitti. Just as the
176
poet seems to move closer and closer to the Florentine people in the Piazza de’ Pitti (at least
subjectively, since she is still looking through the frames of the windows in her house), so her
line of vision contracts from a panorama to a much more intimate perspective when she
describes the Grand Duke’s similarly overlooking presence. Just as the poet imagines what the
Florentine people were thinking and feeling as she looks out her window (in lines 446–461), so,
too, does she imagine what the Grand Duke was thinking and feeling as she describes the
moment when he looks out his (in lines 557–576):
Nor was it ill, when Leopoldo drew
His little children to the window-place
He stood in at the Pitti, to suggest
They too should govern as the people willed.
What a cry rose then! Some, who saw the best,
Declared his eyes filled up and overfilled
With good warm human tears which unrepressed
Ran down. I like his face; the forehead’s build
Has no capacious genius, yet perhaps
Sufficient comprehension,—mild and sad,
And careful nobly,—not with care that wraps
Self-loving hearts, to stifle and make mad,
But careful with the care that shuns a lapse
Of faith and duty, studious not to add
A burden in the gathering of a gain.
And so, God save the Duke, I say with those
177
Who that day shouted it, and while dukes reign,
May all wear in the visible overflows
Of spirit, such a look of careful pain!
For God must love it better than repose. (I: 557–576)
It’s striking that the poet sees her own optical sensibility reflected in the Grand Duke’s teary
eyes, and in such a visual poem, this may be read as a moment of poetical and political empathy.
In fact, the Grand Duke’s tears seem almost to fill the “lachrymals” she mentions just two lines
before her description of the procession (I: 440).
Barrett Browning’s description of the Grand Duke’s tear-filled eyes is all the more
suggestive when we remember that she never actually saw him face-to-face, window-to-window:
her poet envisages this domestic moment only in hindsight and only in her mind’s eye.138 While
the Casa Guidi and Palazzo Pitti were across the square from one another, they weren’t terribly
close. Markus reminds us that Barrett Browning couldn’t see the Grand Duke, but she might
have been able to trace his figure in the distance, and only since she knew he was standing at his
window with his family. “From the windows in the front of Casa Guidi,” Markus writes, Barrett
Browning, “could discern the ‘window-place’ (I.558) or balcony of the Pitti Palace (Casa Guidi
Windows 86). Barrett Browning’s view would have been “obscured by distance, not to mention
her own nearsightedness” (86). Markus suggests that, even though she couldn’t have seen him
from her vantage point on 12 September 1847, this description is, still, a fair likeness of Leopold
II: Barrett Browning “had seen him at closer range before” (86).
This may be the most provocative moment in parts one and two, both because the poet
takes subjective liberties with her description and because these subjective liberties humanize
138
Barrett Browning’s hindsight is inflected by the reports of those who “saw the best,” which is, of course, an
ambiguous phrase (I: 561). Perhaps these reporters had the clearest visual of the Grand Duke. Perhaps, though,
they were looking to discern “the best” in him.
178
Leopold II. From the poet’s perspective, this moment is especially poignant, because we witness
the Grand Duke teaching his children what it means to “govern as the people willed” (I: 560).
In turn, the poet asks us to believe that Leopold II does, in fact, want to govern the Florentine
people liberally: he may be a good ruler because he appears, here, as a good husband and a good
father. Indeed, the Grand Duke’s children may be the greatest promise of 12 September, since
they embody a future for the republic that transcends their father’s personal and political
legacies. Tellingly, the poet only expresses her hesitations about Leopold II once she asserts her
faith in him, and her faith in him seems to rest on his children, since they remind her of his
potential to be a moral head (of a family or of a state) that his licensing of the Florentine civic
guard doesn’t necessarily.
The poet humanizes Leopold II when she imagines him standing alongside his wife and
his children; however, she realizes that he is just one man. By the end of part one, she warns that
his single promise in this moment won’t secure a future for the republic, and she cautions her
readers against heroicizing Leopold II too hastily:
Meanwhile, in this same Italy we want
Not popular passion, to arise and crush,
But popular conscience, which may covenant
For what it knows. Concede without a blush,
To grant the “civic guard” is not to grant
The civic spirit, living and awake. (I: 741–746)
The poet’s final hope then, is for the Grand Duke and the Florentine people alike to distinguish
between “popular passion” and “popular conscience” (I: 741, 742). Like the “wrong” “men
from humble homes and ducal chairs” share with one another, the “popular conscience” the poet
179
imagines is rooted in a belief that the Grand Duke and the Florentine people envision Tuscan
independence as an inevitable right and as an inevitable conclusion. Yet she realizes that the
Grand Duke and the Florentine people are celebrating the fruits of “popular passion,” not
“popular conscience,” since civic guard seems to have been granted only to appease Tuscans,
whose cries for change reached a fever pitch between August and September 1847. Barrett
Browning’s poet prays that the Grand Duke will stand back and allow the Florentine people to
embody the “civic spirit” necessary for Tuscans’ independence; and this is, then, a call for them
to direct their energies toward a constitution and a republic, not merely toward a civic guard,
especially since the civic guard isn’t actually effecting change, at least at this particular moment.
Barrett Browning’s account of the 12 September procession echoes that of a writer with
whom she is often connected yet with whom she is rarely put in serious conversation: Margaret
Fuller. Fuller also warned her readers about the Grand Duke’s half-hearted acquiescence to the
Florentine people throughout the dispatches she published in the New-York Daily Tribune from
August to October 1847. In fact, dispatches 15 and 17 reveal that people were suspicious of the
Grand Duke’s professed allegiances to Tuscans (over Austrians) long before 12 September 1847.
In a dispatch written on 9 August 1847 but published on 11 September 1847, just one day before
the Florentine procession, Fuller reports that as Tuscans agitated more and more fervently for a
civic guard, Leopold II pleaded with them to be “still”:
The Grand Duke—more and more agitated by the position in which he finds
himself between the influence of the Pope and that of Austria—keeps imploring
and commanding his people to keep still, and they are still and glum as death.
This is all on the outside; within, Tuscany burns and flutters. Private culture has
not been in vain, and there is, in a large circle, mental preparation for a very
180
different state of things from the present, with an ardent desire to diffuse the same
amid the people at large. The Sovereign has been obliged for the present to give
more liberty to the press, and there was an immediate rush of thought to the new
vent; if it is kept open a few months, the effect on the body of the people cannot
fail to be great. (Dispatches from Europe 142)
The poet’s ambivalence toward the Grand Duke in part one of Casa Guidi Windows isn’t, then,
as strange as Barrett Browning critics often suggest, for Fuller also realizes that the Florentine
people are gaining momentum because “popular passion” (not because “popular conscience”)
demands that the Grand Duke acquiesce by granting nominal liberties.
Strangely, there hasn’t been a sustained discussion of the similarities between Barrett
Browning’s and Fuller’s descriptions of 12 September 1847, though we often think of the two
women as kindred spirits.139 Fuller didn’t witness the 12 September procession firsthand; much
to her dismay, she arrived one day late. Still, in a dispatch written on 18 October 1847 and
published on 27 November 1847, she describes what she saw upon her arrival:
I arrived in Florence, unhappily, too late for the great fete of the 12th September,
in honor of the grant of the National Guard. But I wept at the mere recital of the
events of that day, which, if it should lead to no important results, must still be
hallowed for ever in the memory of Italy for the great and beautiful emotions that
139
John Matteson reminds us that Fuller read Barrett Browning while reviewing books for the New-York Daily
Tribune. In “Miss Barrett’s Poems” (published 4 January 1845) Fuller ranks Barrett Browning “‘above any female
writer the world has yet known’” (284). When Fuller travelled from United States to England, she specifically
sought Barrett Browning’s company. Fuller arrived in Liverpool on 11 August 1846 and in London on 1 October
1846 (her journey from Liverpool to London was circuitous; she travelled across England and Scotland, most
notably to the Lake District, during the month of September 1846). Elizabeth Barrett married Robert Browning on
12 September 1846; the two eloped on 19 September and travelled to France and then to Italy immediately thereafter
(318). Fuller missed Barrett Browning by just two weeks, then; and though she didn’t meet her when she arrived in
London in October 1846, the two did meet, finally, in Florence in September 1849. “To her surprise,” Matteson
continues, “the most radiant person she encountered in London, and in all of the British Isles for that matter, was an
Italian: Giuseppe Mazzini” (318).
181
flooded the hearts of her children. The National Guard is hailed with no undue
joy by Italians, as the earnest of Progress, the first step toward truly national
institutions and a representation of the people. Gratitude had done its natural
work in their hearts; it had made them better. Some days before were passed by
reconciling all strifes, composing all differences between cities, districts, and
individuals. (158)
In 1847, Barrett Browning and Fuller didn’t yet know one another personally, and they couldn’t
have read one another’s descriptions of the “fete,” which they wrote in late September and in late
October respectively. Yet Barrett Browning’s poem and Fuller’s dispatch portray the Florentine
people’s “spirit” with uncannily similar language.
For instance, both Fuller and Barrett Browning intimate that the civic guard lifts the
Florentine people’s “spirit,” even though they remained effectively powerless and even though
the Grand Duke didn’t match this promise with a constitution until 15 February 1848. Fuller
sees “strangers” and “foes” “kiss” one another at the moment when their shared hopes for a civic
guard are finally realized: “They wished to drop all petty, all local differences, to wash away all
stains, to bathe and prepare for a new great covenant of brotherly love, where each should act for
the good of all. On that day they all embraced in sign of this—strangers, foes, all, exchanged the
kiss of faith and love; they exchanged banners as a token that they would fight for, would
animate, one another” (Dispatches from Europe 158). Barrett Browning similarly sees “friends”
and “foes” as they “kissed” one another’s cheeks at the margin of the square during the
procession:
Friends kissed each other’s cheeks, and foes long vowed
More warmly did it,—two months’ babies leapt
182
Right upward in their mother’s arms, whose black,
Wide glittering eyes looked elsewhere. (Casa Guidi Windows I: 527–530)
Both of these passages remind us that this procession represents a potential revision of the
Guelf’s and Ghibelline’s long feudal history. Fuller couldn’t have known that Barrett Browning
also saw this particular day through this particular perspective, and that she was drafting a poem
about it already. Yet she sees the Florentine people’s heartfelt allegiances to one another as
“poetic” in her post-12 September dispatch. “All was done in that beautiful poetic manner
peculiar to this artist people,” Fuller writes, “but it was the spirit, so great and tender, that melts
my heart to think of” (Dispatches from Europe 158). Ultimately, Barrett Browning and Fuller
both discern the emergence of a “civic spirit,” in the Florentine people that transcends the “civic
guard” (Casa Guidi Windows I: 745–746; Dispatches from Europe 158). Barrett Browning, in
fact, puts the words “‘civic guard’” in scare quotation marks to contrast them to “civic spirit,”
suggesting that the soldiers don’t fully embody the “conscience” of the revolution (Casa Guidi
Windows I: 743).
At the end of her dispatch about the 12 September procession, Fuller writes that this
turning point in Austro-Tuscan history recalls the American Revolution, when patriots overthrew
British colonial authority and claimed “that all men have equal rights, and that these are birthrights, derived from God alone” (Dispatches from Europe 159). Fuller italicizes “birth” in
“birth-rights” to emphasize her point that the Florentine people’s “rights” to a civic guard, a
constitution, and a republic are inherent. In part two of Casa Guidi Windows, though, Barrett
Browning’s poet compares the literal birth and the literal infancy of her child to the birth and the
infancy of her adopted nation: part two opens when the baby is two months old and closes when
he is two years old.
183
1849 was a pivotal year for Fuller and for Barrett Browning alike. Both women became
increasingly frustrated with the forestalled revolutions in Rome and in Florence. Both wrote
fervently about their ambivalent faith in the Risorgimento, in part because they were
disappointed (to varying degrees) in Romans, in Tuscans, in Anglo-American expatriates, and
especially in the Catholic Church. 1849 was also a pivotal year for these two figureheads of
mid-nineteenth century letters, because both were new mothers. Robert Wiedeman (Pen) Barrett
Browning was born in Florence (actually in the Casa Guidi) on 9 March 1849. Angelo Eugenio
Filippo (Nino) Ossoli was born in Rieti (where his father, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli, served
in the civic guard) on 5 September 1848.
While Pen appears famously as Barrett Browning’s “blue-eyed prophet” in Casa Guidi
Windows, Nino is never mentioned in Fuller’s public letters and almost never mentioned in the
private correspondence she kept (on and off) with her mother (II: 757). Fuller finally met
Barrett Browning three years after she first travelled from Boston to Liverpool and to London.
When the two women met in Florence in September 1849, then, they weren’t the famous
unmarried, childless writers they had been when Fuller narrowly missed Barrett Browning in
London in September 1847. The two years must have seemed, in many ways, decades apart for
Fuller and for Barrett Browning. These life-altering two years must have been on Fuller’s mind
during the first days and weeks of her friendship with Barrett Browning, for she had kept her
husband and her child a secret from her mother until 31 August 1849, when she finally revealed
why she’d been so distant. Fuller travelled, then, from Rome to Perugia and then to Florence,
the next day.140 The Ossolis arrived in Florence by the end of the month, and they remained
140
Matteson writes that “the Ossoli’s set off toward Florence, where they planned to stay the winter,” on August 31,
“the same day Fuller wrote to her mother” about her marriage and her new-born child and the same day she
composed her final dispatch (no. 35) from Rome to the New-York Daily Tribune (401).
184
there until 15 or 16 May 1850. Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Giovanni Ossoli were both under
Austrian surveillance the entire time.141
Matteson writes that Fuller and Barrett Browning were, in many ways, an odd pair,
because they had such different temperaments. Barrett Browning “was at first mildly taken
aback by the strange pairing of the talkative, intellectual American wife and her polite but
thoroughly taciturn Italian husband, and she suspected that, if the two ever did remove to
America, the ‘Yankees’ would more or less ignore Giovanni” (407). Still, they had much in
common: “Both had grown up with demanding fathers. Both had been born into comfortable
circumstances, only to see their families’ fortunes erode. Elizabeth had a son about six months
younger than Nino, as well as a keen interest in the endless anecdotes about American literati
that Margaret was pleased to tell” (407). Matteson’s most provocative suggestion—that Fuller
and Barrett Browning would have been even greater friends had they not discussed politics—
may be surprising for mid-nineteenth-century critics, since we often only think of them in terms
of their simpatico faith in the Risorgimento. Matteson argues, however, that Fuller’s support of
the Roman and the Tuscan revolutions was too radical even for Barrett Browning; the two
women supported the revolutions for different reasons.
Fuller’s empathies with Italians were rooted in her belief that politics, economics, and the
Catholic Church suppressed the poor from realizing “equal rights,” which were, from her
perspective, “birth-rights.” Barrett Browning’s empathies weren’t as radical as Fuller’s, even if
they shared the belief that Italians should be liberated from Franz Joseph I and from Pius IX,
141
“Shortly after the family’s arrival,” Matteson writes, Giovanni Ossoli “was arrested and briefly interrogated.
Only after Fuller appealed through a friend to the grand duke’s minister of foreign affairs was Ossoli issued a pass
that entitled him to remain in Tuscany until the following summer. Throughout the remainder of their stay,
Margaret and Giovanni were under government surveillance. Thankfully, though, the Austrian occupiers conducted
themselves with restraint. ‘One would not think,’ Fuller commented, ‘that men installed where they are not wanted
and ought not to be could seem so gentlemanly’” (402). Though never interrogated or imprisoned, Effie Ruskin
writes similarly of the Austrian officers and soldiers in her Venetian correspondence from the same period.
185
among others. While Barrett Browning saw Florence as a place of hope, or potential hope,
Fuller saw it as a place of potential hopelessness (for personal and political reasons). Barrett
Browning may have been disillusioned with the Florentine people’s failure to sustain a
constitution and a republic following the Austrian occupation. Yet Fuller, who was married to a
radical nobleman, experienced the consequences of these failures much more personally, since
she was vulnerable in Florence because of her work on behalf of the Roman and the Tuscan
revolutions.142 Indeed, as Matteson attests, Fuller and Barrett Browning may or may not have
seen eye-to-eye about the details of the Roman and the Tuscan revolutions. Indeed when we
read Barrett Browning’s poem and Fuller’s dispatches in conversation with one another, it’s clear
that even if they had different reasons for supporting the Risorgimento (and didn’t support Franz
Joseph I, Leopold II, and Pius IX), they also experienced a mutual ambivalence during this
tumultuous year, when they grew to know one another.
The ambivalence that fills Barrett Browning’s and Fuller’s 1847 work becomes all the
more pronounced by 1849, when Barrett Browning returned to Casa Guidi Windows and when
Fuller moved from Rome to Florence. Barrett Browning began drafting part two in May 1849
(just after the Austrians defeated the Sardinians at Novara and just four months before the
Ossolis arrived in Florence), and she published it with part one as Casa Guidi Windows in May
1851. The first two reviews appear on 31 May in The Literary Gazette and in The Standard of
Freedom; many more followed in June and in July. While part one dilates on Tuscan history and
literary history broadly in many ways, it is centered one crucial event, the 12 September
142
“Florence had never been one of Fuller’s favorite places,” Matteson writes; and she “had always regarded it as a
place for study and business, where the pleasures of daily life were ‘not … so great.’ In a tone that complemented
neither city, she had once called it the Italian counterpart of Boston” (401). “Fuller also looked down on the
Florentines for being slow to rally as revolution swept through other parts of Italy” Matteson continues; “even after
living there for nearly half a year, she was to persist in calling the city ‘cowardly.’ Now, however, the city’s
moderation meant that the post-revolutionary reaction was less fierce there than elsewhere. A radical refuge might
live there for months practically unmolested” (401).
186
procession. In part two, Barrett Browning studies another crucial event, the 2 May procession
that marks the Austrian army’s occupation of Florence and the soon-to-be return of the Grand
Duke. The parallels between parts one and two aren’t, however, as uncomplicated as many
critics suggest. For though Barrett Browning directly compares the 12 September and the 2 May
procession in the first few verse paragraphs of part two, and though the rest of the plot centers
around the Austrian army’s ultimate occupation, most of the poem traces what the poet sees
through her windows in the months immediately before and immediately after this pivotal
historical moment. All told, part two covers over thirty months: it details the moments when the
Grand Duke flees Florence; when the Austrian army enters Florence (at this point, the poet’s son
is two months old); when the Grand Duke returns to Florence from Gaeta; and when the poet
renews her faith in a future for the republic while gazes at her son, who is now two years old.
Before turning to my close reading, then, I’ll review the historical events that the poet
witnesses between January 1849 and May 1851. For just as the plot of Middlemarch doesn’t
unfold linearly, day-by-day, so the plot of Casa Guidi Windows doesn’t unfold in linearly,
month-by-month; and though Barrett Browning reminds us, almost insistently, of the parallels
between parts one and two, the poet jolts us backwards from May 1849 to January 1849 before
bringing us back to May 1849 and finally to May 1851.
On 7 February 1849, the Grand Duke fled from Florence to Siena, and the Pope fled from
Rome to Gaeta. By 9 February 1849, the constitutional assembly in Florence proclaimed a
republic. Leopold II then travelled from Siena to Santo Stefano and from Santo Stefano to
Gaeta, where he met Pius IX on 18 February 1849 (Markus 101–102; Gilmour 161–162; for
Barrett Browning’s poetic account of this, see Casa Guidi Windows II: 100–105). In turn, the
Florentine people celebrated the realization of their republic; this moment appears in the poem as
187
a revision in the refrain from “Long live the duke!” to “Long live the people!” (see II: 112–117).
Between mid-February and mid-March, the civic guard marched through Florence daily;
revolutionaries and shopkeepers adorned storefronts with new patriotic signs and slogans (see II:
121–129). The Spring of 1849 turned, however, on 22–23 March, when the Austrians defeated
the Sardinians at Novara, which endangered nascent republican independence in cities across
central Italy. By early April 1849, the Florentine municipal council appealed to the Grand Duke,
who was never truly villainized by the Florentine people, despite his obviously divided
allegiances to Tuscans and to Austrians: the Florentine people, in fact, beseeched him to return
to the city in order to protect them from foreign invasion. In turn, Leopold II sent Luigi
Serristori to Florence on 1 May, and on 2 May, the Austrian army entered Florence; this is the
procession we witness at the beginning of part two (see II: 260–273 for the second revision in
the refrain, from “Long live the people!” back to “Long live the Duke!”).143 Leopold II reentered Florence himself on 28 July 1849, just two months before the Brownings and the Ossolis
finally met.144
In a letter to Mary Mitford dated 30 April 1849, Barrett Browning glosses the Grand
Duke’s duplicitous allegiances to Tuscans and to Austrians during the Spring of 1849 as “two
revolutions”: the first in February when he fled Florence for Siena and then for Gaeta, and the
second after Novara when the Florentine people beseeched him to return (Letters 400). It’s
telling that this twinned epistolary narrative is both a critique of the Grand Duke and a critique of
the Florentine people. “My faith in any species of Italian is,” Barrett Browning confesses,
143
In a letter to Mary Mitford dated 30 April 1849, Barrett Browning writes that “[t]he same tune, sung under the
windows, did for ‘Viva la Repubblica!’ and ‘Viva Leopoldo!’ The genuine popular feeling is certainly for Leopold
(‘O, santissima Madre di Dio!’ said our old nurse, clasping her hands, ‘how the people do love him!’) only nobody
would run the risk of a pin’s prick to save the Ducal throne” (Letters 401).
144
For a synopsis of the tensions between the Austrians and the Tuscans, and of the Grand Duke’s relationships
with the two parties, see “The ‘springtime of the peoples’ (1848–49)” in Lucy Riall’s Risorgimento (20–25).
188
“nearly tired out. I don’t believe they are men at all, much less heroes and patriots. Since I last
wrote you, I think we have had two revolutions here at Florence; Grand Duke out, Grand Duke
in. The bells in the church opposite rang for both. They first planted a tree of liberty close to our
door, and then they pulled it down” (Letters 400–401). Barrett Browning’s ambivalence—
even her coy “I think”— results from the Grand Duke’s and the Florentine people’s unsurefooted support of the republic during this period. Perhaps counter-intuitively, at least from
Barrett Browning’s perspective, the Grand Duke’s and the Florentine people’s antipathy between
their outward expressions of patriotism and their inward reservations about a non-AustroFlorentine future seem to parallel one another.
For the Grand Duke’s faith in the viability of a civic guard and a constitution existing
alongside his ducal chair falters once the Florentine people have sustained the republic between
the Spring of 1848 and the Spring of 1849—a period of time that remains unnarrated in the plot
of the poem and is present only in the interstices between parts one and two. Indeed, once he
flees, their expressions of patriotism shift from valorizing his ducal chair to valorizing “il
popolo”; this revision in their songs lasts until late March, when they realize, in the wake of
Novara, that their republic will not be able to withstand Austrian forces. Only then do the
Florentine people renew their faith in the Grand Duke, and when he appears, he appears as
‘Leopold d’ Austria,’ not as ‘Leopoldo Secundo’ (Markus, Casa Guidi Windows 100).145 Even
when Barrett Browning abridges the tumultuous events that defined Florence from February to
April as “Grand Duke out, Grand Duke in,” she frames this twofold revolution through her
145
“After he left Florence in 1849,” Markus reminds us, the Grand Duke “came under Austrian influence and
resumed his Austrian titles. He reentered Florence escorted by Austrian troops. Still, against Austrian pressure, he
insisted on wearing the uniform of the Tuscan Civic Guard rather than the uniform of an Austrian Field-Marshal, an
honorary rank to which he was entitled as a Hapsburg Prince. By doing so, he was symbolically stressing his Italian
blood and his independence from Austria. However, a few nights later he was convinced to wear an Austrian
uniform to a gala opera performance. From then on he was clearly no longer ‘Leopoldo Secundo’ but ‘Leopold d’
Austria’” (Casa Guidi Windows 100).
189
critique of the Florentine people. For if the Florentine civic guard had become, in fact,
something much more than a nominal standing army, then when the Austrians defeated the
Sardinians at Novara, they might have been able to sustain a republic throughout the spring and
the summer and perhaps even long after, and they wouldn’t have had to retract their
independence by sending for the Grand Duke and the Austrian army.
In part two of Casa Guidi Windows, Barrett Browning also dramatizes the events of the
fall of 1847 and the spring of 1849 as “two revolutions” that parallel one another, but only with
the clarity of hindsight. The poet begins part two by reminding us of what she witnessed in
September 1847:
I looked forth,
And saw ten thousand eyes of Florentines
Flash back the triumph of the Lombard north,—
Saw fifty banners, freighted with the signs
And exultations of the awakened earth,
Float on above the multitude in lines,
Straight to the Pitti. So, the vision went.
And so, between those populous rough hands
Raised in the sun, Duke Leopold outleant,
And took the patriot’s oath, which henceforth stands
Among the oaths of perjurers, eminent
To catch the lightnings ripened for these lands. (II: 28–39)
By the midpoint of the poem, then, we’ve seen this procession at two removes: the first a few
weeks after it first happened (part one) and the second a few years after (part two). Both are, in
190
many ways, interpretations of what she saw, since they are (the first time, but especially the
second time) self-conscious of their backward-looking perspectives. Even in part two, the 12
September procession remains vividly immediate within the poet’s mind. Indeed, her language
(she “looked forth / And saw ten thousand eyes of Florentines / flash back”) may be disorienting,
at least at first, since the phrase “looked forth” suggests she is looking not just from the frames of
the windows but out into the present and even the future; really, though, this is a “[f]lash back”
(II: 28, 30). As Groth writes, this moment is one of many “double vision[s]” throughout Casa
Guidi Windows, since Barrett Browning “overlays her impressions of the first demonstration
with the disillusioning sight of the Austrian troops re-entering Florence ahead of the now
discredited Duke after the defeat of the Italian troops at the Battle of Novara in late March 1849”
(41). Ultimately, the poet’s “second impression” of the 12 September procession is crucial to the
second part of the poem, Groth argues, for it remains a “haunting” presence as she traces what
happened from February 1849 to May 1849 and then, once we’ve caught up to the present-tense
moment that inspires part two in the first place, from May 1849 to May 1851 (41).146
Barrett Browning’s poet turns immediately from this retrospect about 12 September 1847
to a meditation on the Grand Duke’s duplicity, inspired by what she saw through the frames of
her windows on 2 May 1849:
146
Arguably, this moment anticipates the Grand Duke’s return on 28 July 1849, three months after the Austrian
army’s occupation. Alison Case traces a similarly complicated chronology in Aurora Leigh. “What begins to
emerge from Aurora Leigh,” Case writes, “are two different kinds of story, which have in turn two different kinds of
narration. The first, which corresponds roughly with the first four books of the poem, is the Kunstlerroman. It is
told as a fully-conceived, retrospective narrative: as the reviewer says, ‘she had it all in her mind at that moment’”
(25). Case, like Rosenblum, Leighton, Groth, and Chapman, reads book five as the narrative turning point, since it a
turn in the speaker’s poetic and metapoetic perspective. “In Book Five, the novel shifts both its subject matter and
its mode of narration. At the opening of this book, Aurora makes her most forceful and coherent statement of what
Art in her age can and should be. She chides fellow poets for preferring a romanticized distant past to the heroism
and beauty of the everyday present, speaking as someone confident both of her abilities and of her right to judge her
fellow-artists. Unsurprisingly, this section of the poem is frequently cited as Barrett Browning’s own poetic
manifesto” (25).
191
Why swear at all, though false Duke Leopold?
What need to swear? What need to boast thy blood
Unspoilt of Austria, and thy heart unsold
Away from Florence? It was understood
God made thee not too vigorous or too bold;
And men had patience with thy quiet mood,
And women, pity, as they saw thee pace
Their festive streets with premature grey hairs.
We turned the mild dejection of thy face
To princely meanings, took thy wrinkling cares
For ruffling hopes, and called thee weak, not base.
Nay, better light the torches for more prayers
And smoke the pale Madonnas at the shrine,
Being still “our poor Grand-duke, our good Grand-duke,
Who cannot help the Austrian in his line,”—
Than write an oath upon a nation’s book. (II: 40–55)
Nowhere in this passage does the poet specifically describe what was happening outside the
windows of her home on 2 May or even what she saw that day; this is, rather, a cerebral retelling
of what she was thinking and feeling in the aftermath of the Austrian army’s occupation. The
unfiltered facts of the Austrian army’s procession are, in fact, missing from part two (until II:
285–301), suggesting that the poet either assumes we are as familiar as she is with what
happened on 2 May (since it was, at the time of the poem’s publication, two years past) or that
she is so overwhelmed by what happened between March and April 1849, and especially during
192
the first two days of May, that she cannot pause to articulate the implied inverse to the 12
September procession: the 2 May occupation of Florence by the Austrian army. In fact, the
word “ruffling” at beginning of part two recalls the “ruffled” “banners” we see in part one (II:
50; I: 554).
Barrett Browning’s first retellings of the spring of 1849 seem, then, to be self-consciously
disorienting, both for her and for her readers. Indeed, this illegibility and this implicit
comparison between the 12 September and the 2 May processions are crucial to the meaning of
the poem and to the discontinuous plot that unfolds across Casa Guidi Windows, for we must
discern for ourselves what happened between September 1847 and the starting point of part two
(which we know, by the end of the poem, is 2 May) and between the starting point of part two
and the moment when the poet ends her story (which may be as late as May 1851, when Barrett
Browning published the poem as a whole). Helen Vendler offers a useful approach to this
meaningful illegibility in her essay on Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Herman
Melville’s collection of poems about the American Civil War. Ultimately, as Vendler argues,
many of the poems in this collection invert the structure of a traditional lyric: for a traditional
lyric reveals certain information in a certain order, and readers often depend upon this
understood poetic logic. The lyric subject first glosses the occasion (or, in Melville’s and Barrett
Brownings’s cases, the historical occasion) that inspires the “moment’s monument.” The lyric
subject turns, then, to a meditation on what he or she thinks, feels, and realizes in the wake of
this moment. Like Melville’s Battle-Pieces, Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows reverses
this structure and upends this understood poetic logic. At the beginning of part two, Barrett
Browning’s poet asks us to deduce the historical event through what she’s thinking and feeling in
193
the present tense and through her references to the 12 September procession that immediately
precedes this moment, both in part one and in part two.147
Indeed, the fact that this passage immediately follows her memory of the 12 September
procession is crucial. Barrett Browning’s twinning of these two events suggests that what
follows (a description of the months just before and just after 2 May) is, from her perspective
(though perhaps counter-intuitively to us) a tragic extension of 12 September. While the
Florentine civic guard and the Austrian army embody very different political states (on the one
hand a republic; on the other a duchy), the processions attending their respective occupations
within the city suggest to the poet that this occasion is a mere spectacle of the Grand Duke’s,
and, consequently, the Florentine people’s ambivalence. It’s no mistake, perhaps, that part two
of Barrett Browning’s two-part poem begins with this double vision. Coupled with Armstrong’s
discussion of the double poem, Vendler’s discussion of inverse lyric forms might help us to read
parts one and two in terms of non-linear continuity: we need to understand not just what the poet
saw in the first part but also what she was thinking and feeling in order to make sense of what
she is thinking and feeling in the second part—and to contextualize the poet’s present-tense
moment historically. For once we contextualize the poet’s present-tense moment in the
beginning of part two, we can, as Vendler argues, search for the flashpoints that inspire the
poet’s philosophical dilation in the first place.
147
In “Melville and the Lyric of History,” Vendler writes: “If one wishes to be sure of grasping Melville’s ironies,
the most gnarled and compressed of the ‘battle-pieces’ demand rereading. An unusual structural principle, too,
makes his historical poetry difficult. It is typical of Melville to reverse the usual manner in which lyric poems
unfold. While the normative lyric presents at its beginning a first-person narrative with its accompanying feelings
(and only secondarily, when plot and emotion have been exposed and clarified, turns to philosophical
generalizations), Melville tends, by contrast, to offer first an impersonal philosophical conclusion, next the narrative
that has produced it, and last the lyric feelings accompanying it. This is the most original method Melville
discovered by which he could fold the epic matter of history into lyric, and it is this and other strategies in his Civil
War lyrics that I want to examine in some detail” (255–256). Consequently, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is
a collection of hybrid poems: they are both narratives and lyrics. The same could be said of parts one and two of
Casa Guidi Windows.
194
In fact, when the poet describes her frustration with the Grand Duke in the beginning of
part two, she returns to the portrait of him standing with his wife and his children from part one;
the portrait is envisaged, now, at a double remove in her mind’s eye. Humiliated that she has
duped herself into trusting this man with the future of a republic in Tuscany, she asks her
compatriot readers to forgive her for her misjudgment (or supposed misjudgment) about the
Grand Duke (about whom she had had reservations as early as the fall of 1847):
Forgive, that I forgot the mind which runs
Through absolute races, too unsceptical!
I saw the man among his little sons,
His lips were warm with kisses while he swore,—
And I, because I am a woman, I,
Who felt my own child’s coming life before
The prescience of my soul, and held faith high,—
I could not bear to think, whoever bore,
That lips, so warmed, could shape so cold a lie. (II: 91–99)
Tellingly, this apologia is the culminating turn in a series of lines that begin “Absolve me” or
“Forgive me”: for instance, she writes ten lines earlier “Forgive me, ghosts of patriots,—”; and
thirty earlier “Absolve me, patriots, of my woman’s fault / That ever I believed the man was
true!—” (II: 82, 64–65). Barrett Browning’s final apologia is one of the most moving passages
in parts one or two of Casa Guidi Windows. In this moment, the poet humanizes the Grand Duke
(just as she did in her envisaged portrait of him in part one) by presenting his lapses in morality
as unflattering extensions of her own ability to identify with two nations. Crucially, however,
she never jeopardizes her morality in favor of England or Italy, while he disappoints both Austria
195
and Italy through his immorality. In fact, he doesn’t help the Florentine people sustain their
constitution and their republic as he indicated he would when he promised to support a civic
guard, and she regrets she ignored her initial doubts.
Indeed, if there is a turn in this poem from faith to dashed faith, then it belongs to the
Grand Duke as much as it does to the poet, and it extends across parts one and two, not just in
the interstices. In fact, the Grand Duke’s and the poet’s respective “discrepancies” actually
inform one another within the logic of the poem and become central to our understanding of their
expatriate civic belongings. While the Grand Duke was born in Florence, he identifies as an
Austro-Florentine (not as a Florentine). Barrett Browning’s poet wasn’t born in Florence, but
she adopts Italy as her surrogate homeland, and identifies as an Anglo-Florentine (not as a
Florentine-by-birth). It may be tempting, then, to read the Grand Duke’s and the poet’s
expatriate civic belongings as negations of one another (at this moment, he emphasizes the
Austro in Austro-Florentine while she emphasizes the Florentine in Anglo-Florentine); however,
civic belongings, especially expatriate civic belongings, can never be reduced to simple
dualisms. The problem of where one is born haunts the poem, then, and it’s something the poet
returns to, again and again, when she traces her own personal and political crises and when she
traces the Grand Duke’s.
The most poignant part of this passage may be the poet’s subtle allusions to his
children—and to her own unborn child. Barrett Browning’s poet imagines “the lie” breathed
through Leopold-II-the-father’s mouth, not Leopold-II-the-surrogate-royal’s (II: 99). While her
(even half-hearted) faith in the Grand Duke is much more detached across the rest of the poem,
his public and private identities are inseparable from one another in this moment. Ultimately,
she is disappointed in him because she has humanized him, not because she has heroicized him.
196
For the Grand Duke’s most damning flaw may be that he lied not just to the people in the square
he was overlooking; it is also, and perhaps much more intimately, that he lied to his own
children. Barrett Browning’s poet represents the Grand Duke’s human flaws most vividly by
zooming inward (as she did in part one), not just toward the window where he stood with his
wife and his children, but toward his “lips” at the moment when “he swore” to support the
Florentine people’s independence. Yet even though the poet is (or imagines she is) close enough
to the Grand Duke to discern his “lips,” her retrospect renders him an impersonal figurehead.
Within the logic of the passage, in fact, the Grand Duke’s most damning fault is his betrayal of
his children, for it suggests he is incapable of the “cold[ness]” he ultimately demonstrates: the
poet can’t fathom how his “lips,” “warm with kisses while he swore,—” “so warmed, could
shape so cold a lie” (II: 95, 99).
Barrett Browning’s poet says—not once but twice, in line 94 and in line 99—that the
Grand Duke promised the Florentine people to support a Florentine civic guard in this moment.
Yet this passage also suggests that he implies the possibility of a future constitution and a future
republic; these two things remain unnarrated in the plot of the poem (since they took place in the
spring of 1848). By the spring of 1849, the Grand Duke’s promise for a constitution and a
republic would have been tantamount to “a lie,” since he reneged his support of the Florentine
people and since the geopolitical situation in central Italy necessitated that the Florentine civic
guard be replaced by the Austrian army. To be sure, the Grand Duke didn’t fulfill his “oaths”;
and Barrett Browning’s poem sharply outlines the “discrepancies” between his perceived
intentions in 1847 and in 1849 through its two-part structure. It’s important to remember,
however, that this passage narrates the Grand Duke’s promise at a double remove: what she is
remembering, from her perspective in the spring of 1849, as an inevitable lie wasn’t. For though
197
she may have worried, as early as September 1847, that Leopold II was torn between his
allegiances to Tuscans and to Austrians, a constitution and a republic were realized in Florence
between the spring of 1848 and the spring of 1849. What she represents as “a lie” in line 94 and
in line 99 may be, then, much more complicated, as the grammar of the sentence intimates.
In the parts of the sentence just before and just after the dashes, Barrett Browning’s poet
confesses her own present-tense equivocation: she realizes she elided her (albeit hesitating) faith
in Leopold II as a father with her faith in Leopold II as a surrogate ruler of Tuscany. In fact, the
three lines between the dashes seem, at least at first, unrelated to the rest of the sentence: “And I,
because I am a woman, I, / Who felt my own child’s coming life before / The prescience of my
soul, and held faith high—” (II: 95–97). Barrett Browning’s language in this passage conveys
the sense of uncertainty that she must have felt between the fall of 1847 and the spring of 1848.
When the poet says she felt her “own child’s coming life before” the “prescience of” her “soul,”
she implies that her ability to feel the unborn baby within her own body was even more real than
the faith she had in this moment when she watched the Grand Duke (before his children) intimate
his faith in the Florentine people and the Tuscan republic. It also suggests that she rests her faith
on the future of a republic under the Grand Duke blindly just as she rests her faith on the birth of
a child she feels within her body but cannot yet see.
Markus notes that Barrett Browning “was pregnant in February 1848 when the Grand
Duke granted a constitution,” but she “had a miscarriage some time before 7 March 1848” (Casa
Guidi Windows 101). Many critics have suggested that the poet’s pregnant body—in 1847 with
the baby she miscarried, or in 1848–1849 with the baby who appears as her two-month-old and
then two-year-old son at the end of the poem—is the ultimate symbol for Risorgimento Italy. To
follow their logic means that this first pregnancy symbolizes the future of a republic that was
198
realized, if briefly, between the spring of 1848 and the spring of 1849; the miscarriage, then,
appears as a portent of the republic’s short life.148 It may be tempting to draw parallels between
the republic and the poet’s unborn child, or to suggest that this moment marks Barrett
Browning’s call for what Gilbert terms the transformation of a patria into matria, since we
envision the poet as a soon-to-be mother just as we envision Leopold II as a fallible father and as
a fallible nobleman.149 Yet Barrett Browning’s language suggests that the poet emphasizes
148
For readings of maternity in Casa Guidi Windows (and often in tandem with Aurora Leigh), see Treves, Alaya,
Gilbert, Phelps, Lewis, Harris, Cronin, and Moine. Barrett Browning critics also often discuss the child at the end of
the poem in conversation with her other maternal poems, especially “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” (1848),
and “A Tale of Villafranca” (1860), “Mother and Poet” (1862). Still other readings draw parallels between Barrett
Browning’s miscarriage and Fuller’s and Anita Ribeiro Garibaldi’s deaths, especially since Garibaldi was pregnant
when she was killed (see Harris, Cronin, and Cordery). Barrett Browning describes Anita Garibaldi’s death at the
end of the poem:
Forlorn
Of thanks, be, therefore, no one of these graves!
Not Hers,—who at her husband’s side, in scorn,
Outfaced the whistling shot and hissing waves,
Until she felt her little babe unborn
Recoil, within her, from the violent staves
And bloodhounds of the world,—at which, her life
Dropt inwards from her eyes and followed it
Beyond the hunters. Garibaldi’s wife
And child died so. And now, the sea-weeds fit
Her body, like a proper shroud and coif,
And murmurously the ebbing waters grit
The little pebbles while she lies interred
In the sea-sand. Perhaps, ere dying thus,
She looked up in his face (which never stirred
From its clenched anguish) as to make excuse
For leaving him for his, if so she erred.
He well remembers that she could not choose. (II: 676–693)
149
For example, as early as 1978, Alaya writes, that “in perceiving Italy’s deliverance as simultaneously rescue and
rebirth—a mutual interplay of heroisms—,” Barrett Browning “has revealed more than merely her sensitivity to the
national egos embroiled in Italian liberation politics: she has […] also invested it with the primal force of all
powerful archetypes, for she has envisioned Italy’s new national being as mother and child at once, delivered out of
her own flesh and baptized in her own blood” (16). “It is hardly surprising,” she continues “that as revolutionary
activity in Italy quickened in the late ’fifties, this particular woman-poet should have identified its resurgent life with
the bodily life restored to her there, or entangled the cultural myths of the nation’s survival and rebirth with the
personal myths of her own. An uncanny identification had already presented itself to her long before: the first
glimmerings of Tuscan liberation, in the founding of the Civic Guard, had appeared on the first anniversary of her
marriage, and her child, conceived during the revolutions of 1848, had been born within days of the popular
uprisings that led to the flight of Duke Leopold from Florence” (19). Gilbert extends Alaya’s readings of Casa
Guidi Windows as well as Poems before Congress and Last Poems: “From this betrayal, this fall into the power of
powers not her own, Italy/Barrett Browning must regenerate herself, and she can only do this, the poet’s metaphors
imply, through a strategic deployment of female, especially maternal energies. By delivering her children born to
death (as soldiers) and life (as heirs), she can deliver herself into the community of nations where she belongs”
199
what’s real, if yet unrealized, and what’s visceral about this moment, even in hindsight. For
when she remembers her pregnancy (just after and just before reiterating the Grand Duke’s
“lie”), she also remembers the ways the unborn baby still embodies her steadfast faith, despite
the fact that she wrongly trusted the Grand Duke, and despite the fact that the baby died before
he or she ever existed apart from her.
Still, why mention the unborn baby?—and why mention the unborn baby here, just at the
moment when she imagines “the lie” Leopold II tells before his children? In contradistinction to
the critics who read the poet’s pregnant body allegorically, I argue that this subtle reference to
miscarriage within the meditation on the Grand Duke’s children is important precisely because it
reminds us of the fragility of human lives, especially nascent human lives. Just as the Grand
Duke’s children should, the poet reasons, stop him from telling a lie, her unborn baby should
help her to tell the difference between a lie (that this moment would mark the beginning of a
separation between Austrians and Tuscans) and the implicit promise, or the implicit and
unfulfilled promise (that this civic guard necessarily means Leopold II would also support a
constitution and a republic). While the poet’s unborn child embodies the future of a republic in
1848, she realizes, in hindsight, in 1849, that this miscarriage may have been tragically
prophetic. Ultimately, her juxtaposition between the constitution/the republic and the unborn
child is jarringly intimate, and it shows how crucial her maternal internalizations are both to her
personal and her political beliefs at this particular moment. Both the Grand Duke’s and the
poet’s children, born and unborn, are, then, central figures not just because they embody a future
(199). “Infusing supposedly asexual poetics with the dreams and desires of a distinctively sexual politics,” Gilbert
continues, Barrett Browning (among many other expatriate Italophiles) “imagined nothing less than the
transformation of patria into matria and thus the risorgimento of the lost community of women that Rossetti called
the ‘mother country’” (195). Moine has argued, much more recently, but in the same vein, that the “ups and downs
of history in the making cannot be differentiated from the birthpangs of a new poetics” (133–134).
200
for the republic, but also and much more importantly, because they inspire their mothers and
their fathers to be faithful.
Just as the unborn baby is embedded as a three-line aside within the seven-line sentence
that begins and ends with the Grand Duke’s oath, line 95 circles back upon itself: it begins,
ends, and is punctuated in the middle with the first-person singular pronoun: “And I, because I
am a woman, I” (II: 95). Barrett Browning critics often focus attention on the poet’s repetition
of “I” within the line and of the line’s close reverberations across the advertisement and part two
of Casa Guidi Windows proper, since it suggests that the poet experiences a heightened sense of
femininity in this particular moment. The prevailing interpretations distinguish between what
Rosenblum terms “the double-nature of the speaker: the persona is both ‘I, a woman” and ‘I, the
poet’” (62).150 For these critics, the “double-nature of the speaker” (the woman-poet complex) is
often elided with the “discrepancies” between parts one and two. Cordery, for instance, writes
that Barrett Browning’s “eye-witness account of ‘I a woman’ and ‘I a poet’ sustains its claim for
truthfulness of the discrepancy between part one, written in 1849, and part two, written” in 1851
(88). In highlighting the potential “discrepancies” between Barrett Browning’s identities as a
woman and as a poet, this school of critics often suggests that the “because I am a woman” line
is, necessarily, tongue-in-cheek. In order for the poet to have politicoaesthetic authority, they
reason, she must disavow the significance of her identity as a woman. In contradistinction to
these critics, I argue that this line isn’t simply ironic: it is crucial that she sees herself both as a
poet and as a woman in this moment, since she envisions her femininity to be central to her sense
of humanity. Barrett Browning’s poet isn’t blaming her sex for her blind faith in the Grand
Duke, then, just as she isn’t equating her 1848 miscarriage with the 1849 fall of the republic.
150
For discussions of “I, a woman”/“I, the poet,” see also Gilbert, Schor, and Cordery.
201
Indeed, the “discrepancies” between parts one and two—to which she alludes in this
apologia—aren’t simply self-deprecating, even if the lines “like a woman,” “because I am a
woman,” and “my woman’s fault,” in the advertisement and in the poem proper seem to be, at
least at first. When the poet confesses that she “takes shame upon herself that she believed, like
a woman, some royal oaths, and lost sight of the probably consequences of some obvious
popular defects,” her tongue may be in her cheek. Yet the appositive “like a woman” doesn’t
mean that her identity as a woman is the reason she believed, and believed wrongly, in the Grand
Duke. While critics often read Barrett Browning’s line as necessarily tongue-in-cheek (because
they assume that this poet would never define her naïveté in terms of her identity as a woman), it
may not be as simple as some have suggested. For within the context of the poem, Barrett
Browning’s references to womanness seem much more akin to a poetics or a metapoetics of
humanness than to a self-deprecating caricature.
In fact, when the poet returns this language in part two, her references to her identities as
a woman and as a mother are counterparts to her references to the Grand Duke’s identities as a
man and as a father. “Absolve me, patriots, of my woman’s fault,” she cries before turning to the
Grand Duke’s oaths, “That ever I believed the man was true!—” (II: 64–65). In 1856, the first
half of this line reads: “Absolve me, patriots, of my woman’s fault” (2: 64). In 1851, however,
the first half reads: “And sigh and do repent me of my fault” (2: 64). The variant shows how
Barrett Browning drew increasing attention to her identity as a woman between the first and the
second editions of the poem; but it’s important not to read this line in isolation, for the
appearance of the word “woman” in 1856 complements the word “man” in the line that follows.
In her notes to Casa Guidi Windows, Markus writes that Barrett Browning “more concretely
implicates herself” in the revisions she made between the 1851 and the 1856 versions of her
202
poem (100). “Unfortunately,” she continues, “although the 1856 revision is tighter and more
vivid as poetry, it may be in part responsible, when taken out of its context, for the charge of
political naïveté against” Barrett Browning; and reductive readers often suggest that this political
naïveté is necessarily gendered (100). Even if the poet forsakes Leopold II for this duplicitous
oath, the pairing of “man” and “woman” across the two lines suggests that she realizes he is, and
she is, too, merely human. Markus is right: the words “man” and “woman” don’t merely
connote their respective genders; rather, these words remind us of their common failures as
human beings. When she beseeches the “ghosts of patriots” to “forgive her” in the lines
immediately following this moment, she admits to herself that they may have died in vain, in part
because of her half-hearted faith in the Grand Duke (II: 82). Ultimately, this part of the
catalogue-like apologia is all the more poignant once she’s described him as a father and herself
as the mother of a miscarried child, for it reminds us of the painful losses of children whose often
abbreviated lives remain unnarrated in the rest of the poem. I’ll return to the “ghosts of patriots”
in the next chapter, where I discuss Vernon Lee’s “The Legend of Madame Krasinksa” (1892).
When the poet turns again from 12 September 1847 to 2 May 1849, she is a new mother,
and she frames the description of her newborn child within a narrative of the Austrian army’s
procession through the Piazza de’ Pitti, still right beneath her windows:
From Casa Guidi windows, gazing, then,
I saw and witness how the Duke came back.
The regular tramp of horse and tread of men
Did smite the silence like an anvil black
And sparkles. With her wide eyes at full strain,
Our Tuscan nurse exclaimed, “Alack, alack,
203
Signora! these shall be the Austrians.” “Nay,
Be still,” I answered, “do not wake the child!”
—For so, my two-months’ babe sleeping lay
In milky dreams upon the bed and smiled,
And I thought, “he shall sleep on, while he may,
Through the world’s baseness. Not being yet defiled,
Why should he be disturbed by what is done?”
Then, gazing, I beheld the long-drawn street
Live out, from end to tend, full in the sun,
With Austria’s thousands. (II: 285–301)
When Barrett Browning’s poet finally describes the arrival of the Austrian army in the Piazza de’
Pitti in real-time, or seeming real-time, the scene is, perhaps, much more horrifying than we
could have imagined, for her infant’s presence reminds us just how vulnerable she must have felt
in the weeks and the months leading up to this moment. Unlike the procession in part one, in
which searches beyond the frames of her windows to fathom what the people outside are
thinking and feeling, the procession in part two forces us back inside: we don’t see the soldiers
as much as we hear them. In fact, the poet’s “gazing” in line 299 seems almost to be an
afterthought.
By the end of the poem, the poet experiences the world outside the Casa Guidi
differently: she’s thinking and feeling on behalf of her newborn son, and the events outside the
frames of her windows are secondary to his immediate comfort. In fact, she doesn’t seem to hear
the Austrian army approaching until her nurse rushes into the room. Only then does she worry
that the “tramp” of their feet and their horses’ feet will wake the baby (II: 287). Given this
204
change in the poet’s temperament, it’s hard not to read these footsteps in terms of Barrett
Browning’s meditation on poetic or metapoetic authority at the beginning of part one. Indeed,
the Austrian army seems to drown out the poet’s voice, just at the moment when she questions
her faith in the anthem she’s heard the boys singing across Casa Guidi Windows, both at the
beginning of part one and at the beginning of part two: “O bella libertà, O bella!” (see
especially I: 1–13, 14–36; II: 1–15). Yet in this moment, when the Austrian army’s footsteps
overwhelm the song that bookends the poem, and when the poet cradles her baby back to sleep,
we must remember that the boys whose song once inspired the poet are now grown up, and they
are likely among the Florentine soldiers who idle in the street below.
While Barrett Browning’s poet is overwhelmed by the noisiness of the procession,
Barrett Browning herself seems to have been haunted by its stillness. In a letter to her sister
Henrietta dated 2–5 May 1849, she writes: “While I was writing these last sentences, I heard the
nurse calling me, ‘Signora! Signora! Ecco i Tedeschi!’ The Austrians had arrived. We ran out
on the terrace together—and up from the end of the street and close under our windows came the
artillery and baggage waggons—the soldiers sitting upon the cannons, motionless, like dusty
statues” (qtd. in Treves 80). “Slowly the hateful procession filed under our windows,” Barrett
Browning continues, and “[t]he people shrank back to let them pass, in the deepest silence—not
a word spoken, scarcely a breath drawn. For my part, I felt my throat swelling with grief and
indignation. Oh to think of our ever seeing such a sight from these windows. I wish we were a
thousand miles away” (80). It may be no surprise, then, that in the poem, the poet closes the
windows soon thereafter, because she cannot bear to see the Austrians and the Florentines
outside; they remind her that the dream she once had for the future of a republic has been
indefinitely forestalled.
205
Yet by the end of the poem, she opens the windows once more, and now her son is two
years old, not two months old: “The sun strikes, through the windows, up the floor; / Stand out
in it, my own young Florentine, / Not two years old, and let me see thee more!” (II: 742–744).
“Stand out, my blue-eyed prophet!” she repeats, “—thou, to whom / The earliest world-day light
that ever flowed, / Through Casa Guidi windows, chanced to come!” (II: 757–759). By the end
of the poem, the poet sees light flooding in the room, and rather than looking out to see the
Florentine civic guard or the Austrian army, she focuses her attention inward on her son, who
embodies a kind of happiness she doesn’t seem to have had in her life before. While most
Barrett Browning critics read the poet’s son allegorically, as the embodiment of a future Italia,
he seems to inspire in her something much more nuanced, and something much more sacred:
renewed belief in God or in Italy’s divine re-conception.
Indeed, parts one and two are a mediation on ambivalence, especially when read in
conversation with one another; however, the poet turns, here, from the ambivalent states of mind
that characterize both parts one and two to a faith in the beautiful unknown, and if the poet’s son
(presumably Pen) represents something intangible, then it may be an innocent faith in other
people she knows she has lost:
Howe’ver the uneasy world is vexed and wroth,
Young children, lifted high on parent souls,
Look round them with a smile upon the mouth,
And take for music every bell that tolls (II: 768–771)151
It’s important that in the final lines of the poem, the poet’s son isn’t singing the old anthem, “O
bella libertà, O bella!”; instead, we imagine the curl on his lips as he hears the bells toll at a
151
Barrett Browning’s language here echoes the moment when she says she “held faith high” “because [she is] a
woman, [she] / Who felt [her] child’s coming life before / the prescience of [her] soul” (II: 97, 95–96).
206
church nearby: this music replaces the Florentine anthems, the Austrian footsteps, and the
echoes of poets past who haunt his mother. Even amidst the uncertainties of the spring of 1851
and the many springs to come, he discerns a much more peaceful beat. By the end of the poem,
the poet does too, if only through this vision of Pen. “Such cheer I gather from thy smiling,” she
tells her son, “Sweet!” (II: 781).
Pen and the Pen-like boy in Casa Guidi Windows aren’t, of course, the same person.
Still, Matteson recounts a touching story about the friendship between Barrett Browning’s son
and Fuller’s son that illuminates the end of the poem. “The Ossolis spent their last evening in
Florence at the Brownings,” Matteson writes; “The sadness of departing appears to have
outweighed the excitement of the coming voyage,” for the Brownings and for the Ossolis alike
(413). Matteson’s detailed account of the Brownings’ and the Ossolis’ final evening together
would be heartbreaking for any Italophile, but for readers of Casa Guidi Windows, it almost
seems a fiction: “When the Ossolis at last prepared to leave Florence, Elizabeth, who had been
an invalid since her twenties had her husband carry her up six flights of stairs to the couple’s
apartment so that she could attend their farewell party” (408). Though Fuller confessed that she
had “‘never pretended to be [a Christian] except in dabs and sparkles here and there,’” she
purchased a Bible for Nino to give to Pen (413). Perhaps “more surprising still was the
inscription she wrote inside: ‘In Memory of Angelo Eugene Ossoli’” (413). Fuller’s message to
Pen from Nino almost reads as an anticipation of the notices to be published in newspapers
(including the New-York Daily Tribune) over the weeks and the months to come, for the
Elizabeth sank just miles away from Fire Island on 19 July 1850 (413).152 Barrett Browning and
152
Fuller, Ossoli, and their son drowned on 19 July 1850; her history of the Roman Revolution was supposed to
have been on board the ship, though many critics have suggested that this manuscript was far from complete.
According to Barrett Browning, Matteson writes, “the manuscript was still a long way from completion; she later
207
Pen never saw Fuller and Nino again, but we might discern their figures, as much as the
Florentine people’s, in Barrett Browning’s remembrance of the 1847–1851 “ghosts of patriots.”
In the years immediately following Barrett Browning’s death (on 29 June 1861), AngloAmerican Italophiles who read her seem to have had both Casa Guidi the house and Casa Guidi
Windows the poem in their minds—despite the fact that she first published it nearly ten years
before she died. Barrett Browning critics continue to read the poem as an anomaly next to the
other two Italian collections, Poems before Congress and Last Poems (posthumous), perhaps
because it is so much more ambivalent. Whether they square with our mythology of the
Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy, or with our mythology of Barrett-Browning-theItalian-patriot, both the house and the poem have become premature memorials to the rest of her
life.153 For instance, Eliot notes in her journals that she reread Casa Guidi Windows on 19
February 1862, during a period when she seems to have been particularly affected by Barrett
Browning’s steadfast spirituality: “I have lately read again with great delight Mrs. Browning’s
Casa Guidi Windows. It contains amongst other admirable things a very noble expression of
what I believe to be the true relation of the religious mind to the Past” (109). When Eliot and
George Henry Lewes visited Robert Browning in London more than four years after Barrett
Browning’s death, Eliot was especially touched by Barrett Browning’s Hebrew Bible. “I saw the
objects she used to have about her, her chair, tables, books etc. An epoch to be remembered,”
Eliot writes on 15 October 1865; “Browning showed us her Hebrew Bible with notes in her
wrote that, when Fuller left for America, she had amassed only ‘the raw material . . . . [N]othing was finished’”
(409). For a more sustained discussion of the Elizabeth shipwreck, see chapter one.
153
Tricia Lootens shows how such mythologization continues to affect our readings of Barrett-Browning-thewoman and Barrett-Browning-the-poet. Lootens reminds us that “by the time Barrett Browning died, her
significance as a poet and a national, cultural, and political figure was deeply controversial” (128). Barrett
Browning’s “succeeding, highly charged canonization was as conflicted and uneven as any other,” she continues;
and “it encompassed a range of watchwords and iconic anecdotes whose combinations could take unpredictable
even contradictory forms. As phrases that achieved iconicity in one decade sifted into the revisionary narratives of
another, the poem-heroine’s form in one year’s schoolbooks radically diverged from her appearance in that same
year’s literary magazines, lecture halls, or private letters” (128).
208
handwriting” (126). The image of Eliot’s fingers touching the pages and the handwritten notes
that once passed under Barrett Browning’s is haunting, and it suggests that this moment was a
kind of spiritual pilgrimage for the younger writer, who was already drafting her own poems and
novels about Italy.154
Yet the most famous late-nineteenth-century reader of Casa Guidi Windows may be
Henry James, who disparages Barrett Browning’s poem in his biography of William Wetmore
Story. Barrett Browning’s critics are often reluctant to read James reading Barrett Browning,
because his conclusions about her poems seem, at least at first, to be cruelly dismissive;
however, as Frederick Wegener attests, William Wetmore Story and Friends also contains a
much more nuanced portrait of the Risorgimento poet through the letters it reprints. James
reminds us that the Storys and the Brownings were close friends during the early years of the
Risorgimento; overcome with grief at the news that Barrett Browning had died, the sculptor
travelled from Siena to Florence to be with Robert Browning in the Casa Guidi, which must have
felt hollow to him during those first painful days and weeks.
In a letter addressed to Charles Eliot Norton on 15 August 1861, Story records
Browning’s immediate recollections of Barrett Browning’s final days in the Casa Guidi:
“The cycle is complete,” as Browning said, looking round the room; “here we
came fifteen years ago; here Pen was born; here Ba wrote her poems for Italy.
She used to walk up and down this verandah in the summer evenings, when,
revived by the southern air, she first again began to enjoy her out-doors life.
Every day she used to walk with me or drive with me, and once even walked to
Bellosguardo and back; that was when she was strongest. Little by little, as I now
154
For a far less flattering portrait of the poet and her son and of the Casa Guidi, see Hawthorne’s Italian Notebooks
for 9 June 1858. Hawthorne attributes Casa Guidi Windows to Robert Browning, not to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
209
see, that distance was lessened, the active out-doors life restricted, until walking
had finally ceased. We saw from these windows the return of the Austrians; they
wheeled round this corner and came down this street with all their cannon, just as
she describes it in “Casa Guidi.” Last week when we came to Florence I said:
“We used, you know, to walk on this verandah so often—come and walk up and
down once. Just once,” I urged, and she came to the window and took two steps
on it. But it fatigued her too much, and she went back and lay down on the sofa—
that was our last walk. Only the night she went away for ever she said she
thought we must give up Casa Guidi; it was too inconvenient and in case of
illness too small. We had decided to go away and take a villa outside the gates.
For years she would not give up this house, but at last and, as it were, suddenly,
she said she saw it was too small for us and too inconvenient. And so it was; so
the cycle was completed for us here, and where the beginning was is the end.” (2:
64–66).
From Browning’s 1861 perspective, the story of Barrett Browning’s Florentine life is bound to
the story of Casa Guidi. Story’s letter reminds us that Browning perhaps not surprisingly, likely
had the most sensitive appreciation of Casa Guidi the house and Casa Guidi Windows the poem,
for he remembers Barrett Browning’s Florentine life as a non-linear “cycle” that always circles
back to the same place. Browning remembers her beginnings and her ends in Florence as
moments that illuminate one another; his story about her last view from Casa Guidi windows—
and about her last “two steps”—is, in many ways, the most humanizing memorial to her Italian
life we’ve inherited.
210
CHAPTER 4
Florence, 1871–1892
After Solferino: Risorgimento Ghosts and Post-Risorgimento Hauntings in
“The Legend of Madame Krasinska”
In “The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” Vernon Lee’s title character purchases a sketch
of a woman named Sora Lena. Though Madame Krasinska doesn’t immediately recognize the
person in the sketch, the artist who made it, Cecco Bandini (familiarly called Cecchino), tells her
that this woman is an institution among polite society: “Sora Lena—more correctly Signora
Maddalena—had been for years and years one of the most conspicuous sights of the town” (Lee,
“Legend” 156). Cecchino tells Madame Krasinska that Sora Lena is now known throughout
Florence for “her extraordinary costume of thirty years ago”: crinoline, a petticoat, a muff, a silk
shirt, a satin bonnet, and prunella boots (156). Each day she sings Garibaldi’s hymn or “the
soldier song of ’59,” Addio, Mia Bella, Addio,” at the station for her two sons, who never
returned from the battle at Solferino during the summer of 1859 (170).155 Once Cecchino tells
Madame Krasinska that this is a sketch of the woman who always sings Garibaldi’s hymn, her
interest in the sketch sharpens, and she asks to purchase it. At first Madame Krasinska may be
drawn to the sketch because it inspires in her a sense of vague recognition; yet once she realizes
155
Addio, Mia Bella, Addio is a refrain that reverberates across the rest of the story, binding Madame Krasinska’s
and Sora Lena’s memories to one another; this patriotic song becomes, then, a shorthand for the unspeakable grief
that Sora Lena feels for her sons and, ultimately, that Madame Krasinska feels for Sora Lena and (vicariously) for
her sons. The echoic presence of Addio, Mia Bella, Addio in Lee’s story seems, in many ways, to be an extension of
O bella libertà, O bella!, the song that haunts the mother-poet in Barrett Browning’s Florentine diptych Casa Guidi
Windows (1851), which I discuss in chapter three.
211
that this face is one she’s noticed in passing countless times, it becomes more, not less,
compelling to her, and she asks Cecchino to recount Sora Lena’s “story” (156). From Madame
Krasinska’s perspective, then, the vagueness of the sketch materializes the woman’s haunting
presence, which she’s often witnessed herself at the train station. Cecchino realizes that Madame
Krasinska is moved by his work, and because he believes that she displays a “sensitiveness” and
“rapid intuition” for the woman’s (and the sketch’s) tragic beauty, he gives her “the Sora Lena”
(156, 155). Madame Krasinska’s interest in “the Sora Lena” suggests to Cecchino that she
envisages the woman in the sketch with a kind of empathy that is rare, even among the delicate
minds and souls who populate his studio. Ultimately, Cecchino’s assumption forever alters both
Sora Lena’s and Madame Krasinska’s lives.
While Madame Krasinska initially treats “the Sora Lena” as an anachronistic bauble of
Risorgimento Florence, she ultimately impersonates the woman in the sketch, which (the narrator
intimates) effectively kills her. For when she wears the sketch as a mask to Madame Fosca’s
comic costume ball two weeks later, she also wears crinoline, a petticoat, a muff, a silk shirt, a
satin bonnet, and prunella boots. All of Madame Fosca’s guests, including Cecchino,
immediately recognize Madame Krasinska to be “the Sora Lena.” In truth, then, Madame
Krasinska isn’t just displaying a rarefied taste for the woman’s (or the sketch’s) tragic beauty
when she visits Cecchino in his studio. For though she may have been interested in Sora Lena’s
history at the moment when she recognizes the face in the sketch to be the woman she sees and
hears at the train station, it is also, and perhaps much more immediately, her inspiration for “a
comic costume” (158). When Cecchino sees Madame-Krasinska-as-Sora-Lena, he realizes that
she is mocking her, and he is horrified. Yet he is even more horrified the next morning when he
reads Sora Lena’s obituary in the newspaper, for he realizes that Sora Lena’s suicide coincided
212
with Madame Krasinska’s cruel impersonation. Sora Lena may or may not have heard about
Madame Krasinska’s impersonation; however, Cecchino realizes that this confluence of events
(the suicide and the impersonation) may not have been coincidence at all. Perhaps Sora Lena,
who many assume to be “a lunatic,” killed herself because she was humiliated (163).
Throughout the rest of the story, Sora Lena haunts Madame Krasinska. In turn, Madame
Krasinska must face the memories that haunted Sora Lena: Sora Lena’s two sons, Temistocle
and Momino, who died at Solferino on 24 June 1859.156 Ultimately, Lee’s narrator shows how
Madame Krasinska is forced—through this specter—to contend with assumptions she’s held
about the historicization of self during the post-Risorgimento period.
“The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” like many of the other “fantastic tales” Lee wrote
during the 1880s and the 1890s, studies perverse intersections between politics and aesthetics
through its haunted figures. Lee’s fantastic tales often raise questions about the inconclusiveness
of present-tense experience through characters’ terrifying reveries about the past. Unlike most of
Lee’s ghost stories, though, in which the characters are haunted by figures who go back as far as
the Renaissance or the eighteenth century, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” is set almost
156
Solferino was the second of two decisive battles among the Austrians, the Italians, the Piedmontese, and the
French during June 1859. For a sustained discussion of the geopolitical context for these two battles, she chapter
one, where I outline the events of 1858–1859, what is now known as the Second War of Italian Independence. In
short, Magenta (4 June 1859) and Solferino (24 June 1859) were so gruesome that Napoleon III, who had led troops
into battle himself, called for an armistice with the Austrians (without the knowledge of the Piedmontese or the
Italians), leading many to distrust him. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who was still living at the Casa Guidi in
Florence, wrote much of Napoleon III in Italy, and Other Poems (1860), Poems before Congress (1860), and Last
Poems (1862, posthumous) in the wake of the Treaty at Villafranca. “Mother and Poet” is an uncanny anticipation
of Lee’s plot, though it is about the siege of Gaeta, which took place from 5 November 1860 to 13 February 1861.
Barrett Browning figures Laura Savio, a real-life patriot, as the lyric voice. “Mother and Poet” begins: “Dead! One
of them shot by the sea in the east, / And one of them shot in the west by the sea. / Dead! both my boys!” (Last
Poems 1–3, 96–98; these are the first and the lines of “Mother and Poet”). The most poignant stanza may be the
fifth, where the poet describes the guilt she feels for teaching her sons to be patriotic: “To teach them … It stings
there! I made them indeed / Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt, / That a country’s a thing men
should die for at need” (21–23). “I prated of liberty, rights,” she cries, “and about / The tyrant cast out” (24–25).
Throughout “Mother and Poet,” Barrett Browning reminds us of “the tyrant” responsible for the sustained siege at
Gaeta, but she begs for her forgiveness, not his: “Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength, / And bite
back the cry of their pain in self-scorn” (91–92). “But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length,” she
continues, “Into wail such as this—and we sit on forlorn / When the man-child is born” (93–95).
213
exactly at the moment of its composition and its publication, and the characters are haunted by a
much more recent past: Italy’s struggle for independence and unification. Madame Krasinska, a
vaguely Polish and vaguely American expatriate, faces existential crises—who am I really?
where am I really from?—through her appropriation of not-so-distant Florentine ghosts:
Temistocle, Momino, and, most vividly, Sora Lena.157 Lee dramatizes this story’s present-tense
setting during the opening scene, when Cecchino describes Sora Lena to Madame Krasinska. He
mythologizes Sora Lena’s seemingly infinite history, but says, too, that this “extraordinary
costume of thirty years ago” reminds him of the remarkable immediacy bridging 1859 and 1889.
“‘It seems to me as if she must always have been there,’” he tells Madame Krasinska, “‘like the
olive trees and the paving stones; for after all, Giotto’s tower was not there before Giotto,
whereas poor old Sora Lena—But, by the way, there is a limit even to her’” (157). For
Cecchino, Sora Lena’s thirty-year wanderings have elided past and present into one stultifying
grieving period. Cecchino’s sketch suspends Sora Lena in time and becomes a mnemonic
register across the rest of the story, for it is through this rough portrait that Madame Krasinska
recognizes the limits of her own cultural memory and of a past that does and doesn’t really
belong to her.
Lee’s narrative shifts from the present tense to a not-so-distant past and from a limited
third-person perspective to free indirect discourse (both with Cecchino and with Madame
157
Lee’s narrator muses about Madame Krasinksa’s national identity several times, both in the frame and the story.
When she visits Cecchino’s studio, the narrator speculates about her national identity by studying her voice. Though
she speaks French, she sounds American, and yet her name is decidedly Polish: “She spoke French, but with a
pretty little American accent, despite her Polish name. She was very charming, Cecchino said to himself, a radiant
impersonation of youthful brightness and elegance as she stood there in her long, silvery furs, holding the drawing
with tiny, tight-gloved hands, and shedding around her a vague, exquisite fragrance—no, not a mere literal perfume,
that would be far too coarse but something personal akin to it” (155–156). Madame Krasinska’s nominal Polishness
may be an allusion to her own mid-nineteenth-century revolutionary inheritance. It’s important that Madame
Krasinska’s “national identity” remains unrealized (by the narrator and by the other characters), for she seems
equally oblivious about the ways “national identity” determined mid-nineteenth-century lives, including
Temistocle’s, Momino’s, Sora Lena’s, and even Cecchino’s.
214
Krasinska) enact the title character’s hauntings. By focusing attention on Lee’s narrative, this
chapter shows how the Risorgimento is an important (if, for Lee, an atypical) spectral past.158 In
the first half of the chapter, I focus attention on moments when the narrator slides into free
indirect discourse with Cecchino, who superimposes Sora Lena’s “legend” upon Madame
Krasinska through descriptions of the sketch and the muff they both wear. In the rest of the
chapter, I study the subtle narrative shifts from Cecchino’s perspective to Madame Krasinska’s.
As the narrative moves further and further into Madame Krasinska’s mind, Lee reveals details
that suggest she is haunted and has internalized Sora Lena’s consciousness. She knows
impossible details about Sora Lena’s sons and the overwhelming trauma her sons experience at
war. Her uncanny recognitions (eventually she intuits the boys’ names, the songs’ words, the
greenness of certain chemist jars Sora Lena purchased in 1859) are often mentioned alongside
her ongoing meditation on Risorgimento-period unknowns (by 1889, she knows the outcome of
the Second War but still worries as if she has just experienced Solferino herself and is uncertain
about what will happen afterward). The narrative draws attention to these details, highlighting
what Madame Krasinska should and shouldn’t intuit on her own, and teasing us to ask what she
knows and how she knows it. Lee’s narrative strategy is crucial to her treatment of issues as
wide-ranging and interconnected as Madame Krasinska’s demonstrations of embodied and
disembodied cultural memory, the fragile boundaries between what we can and cannot know, the
difficulties of representing war, and the often strange historicizing acts people perform as they
try to come to terms with human mortality.
158
Nicole Fluhr is likewise interested in the ways Lee’s Hauntings “represent an ongoing traffic between present
and past life that ghosts both represent and enact”: “The individual ghosts in Hauntings function as metonyms for
history; they haunt men and women of the 1890s as the historical haunts modern life. Personifying the past, the
charismatic figures with whom the narrators are obsessed make history personal; they concentrate its fascinate in an
individual who effectively stands for a historical epoch” (289).
215
Over the last decade, critical interest in Lee’s fantastic tales has grown, and while there
are no articles or chapters devoted to “The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” which Lee included
in Vanitas: Polite Stories (1892), many people have written about Hauntings (1890).159 Critics
have variously read Lee’s fantastic tales as fictions that fill mid-century spiritual voids,
narratives of often-veiled homoerotic sensuality, reimaginings of an historical or art historical
past, or critiques of fin-de-siècle materialism, consumerism, and taste.160 Still others compare
these fantastic tales to the theories of “empathy” Lee developed by the end of the century and to
the travelogues she wrote across her career, from the 1880s to the 1920s.161 Many of these
readings prioritize connections between spectral pasts and the theories of beauty emerging in the
late nineteenth century. In her prescient article, “Ghosts, Aestheticism, and ‘Vernon Lee,’”
Angela Leighton shows how the ghosts who populate Lee’s stories are “an expression, not of
otherworldly supernaturalism but of this-worldly aestheticism” (2). Leighton’s argument has
become a foundational piece for critics who emphasize Lee’s interests in the ghostly potential of
aesthetic study. Furthermore, she is the first person to connect, if broadly, our understanding of
Hauntings with our understanding of Vanitas (1).
Because Lee’s aestheticism has often been read in terms of a decadent nostalgia, critics
understand her work as inseparable from those of her contemporaries, who were likewise
159
In 2006, Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham edited Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales for Broadview
Press. It contains Lee’s most famous fantastic tales: the entirety of Hauntings (1890), as well as texts from Pope
Jacynth and other Fantastic Tales (1904) and For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (1927). The Broadview Press
collection is the first critical edition of Lee’s fantastic tales. “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” is not included in
the collection.
160
For readings that discuss ghosts, hauntings, and fantastic tales in terms of Victorian crises of faith, see Leighton
and the critical introduction to Hauntings by Maxwell and Pulham. For an analysis of sexual politics, aesthetics, and
the spectral, see Martha Vicinus. For discussions of history, art history, and the theme of nostalgia, see Leighton,
Vicinus, and Tess Cosslett. For interpretations that emphasize Lee’s critiques of fin-de-siècle materialism,
consumerism, and taste, see Kristin Mahoney.
161
Nicole Fluhr reads Lee’s ghosts through the theories of “empathy” she developed by the end of the century; her
article shows how “Lee’s studies emphasize the cataclysmic consequences for subjectivity that ensue when one
person seeks to know another” (287). My discussion of free indirect discourse, a narrative device that enacts this
kind of empathy, complements the ideas Fluhr traces in her readings of Hauntings. For arguments about the manner
in which the travelogues and the tales parallel one another, see Colby and Cosslett.
216
formulating aestheticism with self-consciously achronological revisions of history and art
history. The point of these texts is not to “see the object as in itself it really is,” as Matthew
Arnold argues in “On Translating Homer” (1861) and in “The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time” (1864). Rather, as Walter Pater insists in the “Preface” to Studies in the History
of the Renaissance (1873), it is to describe a thinking subject’s impressions of a past coming to
life, pulse by pulse. In her article, Leighton studies Lee’s “Preface” to Hauntings in order to
theorize the relationships between aestheticism and historicism. She shows how Lee’s ghosts
“figure, not the terror of the unknown, but the seductive, fascinating difference of the past. They
are located in history, not, extraterrestrially, out of it” (1). For Lee, the thinking subject becomes
a ghost-seer, precisely because he or she revivifies a bygone period. Historicizing afresh
becomes, then, Lee’s aesthetic philosophy, both in fiction and in nonfiction texts. Lee’s Studies
in the Eighteenth Century (1880), which is often compared to Pater’s Studies in the History of
the Renaissance, dilates on the period as a cultural moment, not just as a century bookended by
the years 1700 and 1800; it is her most famous book on aesthetic theory. Just as Pater’s
“impressions” dramatize the ways the spirit of the age defy chronological borderlines, so, too, do
Lee’s ideas about the past, which she fictionalizes in her tales. Most critics have come to agree
that there are two kinds of meaningful distancing at work in these fantastic tales: geographical
and temporal.162 Geographically, she distances her characters from English readers because the
ghost stories take place in Italy, Germany, or Spain. Temporally, the characters are removed to
the Renaissance or the eighteenth century through their ghosts.
162
Vineta Colby articulates this most clearly: “With the exception of ‘Oke of Okehurst,’ set in an English country
house, all of her stories of the supernatural are set in Italy, Germany, or Spain in places haunted not by domestic
ghosts of the recent past but by ancient gods and goddesses or by long dead spirits of the Renaissance and eighteenth
century” (226). In fact, Colby argues that since “‘scenery of places’ (setting) figures every bit as prominently as the
‘unlikely heroes and heroines’ (plot), it is instructive to read Vernon Lee’s stories of the supernatural, her works of
pure imagination, alongside her travel writings, based on the reality of geography” (225).
217
Still, “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” is not yet read alongside the fantastic tales that
have become so popular, largely because the story is part of a collection about the nineteenth
century. Critics who have discussed Vanitas tend to focus attention on the other two texts
included in the collection: “Lady Tal” and “A Worldly Woman.”163 These tales, which fit
squarely into existing discussions about Lee’s hot-and-cold friendship with Henry James, are
Lee’s most biting critiques of highbrow aestheticism during the 1870s and the 1880s. James
appears as the implicit subject of critique in both. In “A Worldly Woman,” the characters
misread James’s 1886 novel The Princess Casamassima; their misreadings demonstrate the
manner in which James (whether he appears as one of Lee’s thinly veiled fictional characters or
whether the other characters are merely discussing his books) becomes a referent for the myopia
inherent in decadent worldviews.164 Even still, there are few sustained discussions of “Lady Tal”
and “A Worldly Woman.” Critics do often note them when addressing the afterlife of Miss
Brown (1884), Lee’s first novel, which is notorious for its dedication to James and for its
scathing critique of his circle.165 Yet Lee’s critics remain strangely silent on “The Legend of
Madame Krasinska,” despite its resonance with James’s ghost stories.166
“The Legend of Madame Krasinska” both does and doesn’t fit the terms of
supernaturalism other critics have discussed so far, since it’s isolated, in many ways, from the
other two stories in Vanitas, and since the characters and their ghosts are citizens of the
163
Lee included three tales in the first edition of Vanitas: Polite Stories: “Lady Tal,” “A Worldly Woman,” and
“The Legend of Madame Krasinska.” Another tale, “A Frivolous Conversation,” was appended to later editions and
impressions.
164
For a fuller discussion of intersections between James’s The Princess Casamassima and Lee’s Vanitas: Polite
Stories, see Merete Licht.
165
In fact, James’s response to the dedication may be as notorious as the novel itself and perhaps much more widely
read. In a letter from James to Lee dated 10 May 1885, he faults Miss Brown with “‘exaggerations, overstatements,
grossissiments, instances wanting in tact’” (qtd. in Colby 108). For a detailed account of James’s critique of the
novel, see Colby, 107–110. For a discussion of the Lee-James friendship in conversation with “Lady Tal,” “A
Worldly Woman,” and Miss Brown, see Colby 109 and 189–200.
166
James himself was already known for his own ghosts by 1890, having published “The Romance of Certain Old
Clothes” (1868), “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1871), and many other fantastic tales; his most famous ghost story, The
Turn of the Screw (1898), was published less than a decade after Lee’s early “supernatural” collections.
218
nineteenth century. Vineta Colby’s biography is the only piece of scholarship to address “The
Legend of Madame Krasinska,” and she argues that this contemporaneity is the story’s artistic
flaw.167 “When writing about a society she knew at first hand,” Colby writes, “Vernon Lee
suffered lapses of the creative imagination that gave so much vitality and color to her travel
essays, her studies of the Italian Renaissance and the eighteenth century, and her stories of the
supernatural. Her imagination, which soared when she confronted the past and its vestiges in
modern-day Europe, sank dismally in the immediate present” (190). While Colby addresses the
themes of geographical and temporal displacement often associated with the other fantastic tales,
she doesn’t seem to read “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” as a ghost story, because the title
character’s “madness” is too immediate (192). In the rest of this chapter, I’ll bridge Leighton’s,
Pulham’s, and Colby’s arguments in order to put Lee’s old ghosts in conversation with these
post-Risorgimento hauntings. For if this genre is bound, as Leighton argues, to Lee’s critiques of
Ruskin, Pater, James, and highbrow aestheticism, then Lee’s story about the ghosts who haunt
Florence between 1859 and 1889, the moment when the decadent movement flourished, is as
important as her stories about those who are haunted by Renaissance or eighteenth-century Italy.
Sora Lena’s presence is unnerving across “The Legend of Madame Krasinska”: because
Madame Krasinska never meets Sora Lena face-to-face, and because she never takes an interest
in her story until the moment when she possesses the sketch of the woman, Sora Lena appears as
a spectrely presence both before and after her suicide. In fact, the narrator intimates Sora Lena’s
ghostliness as early as the first scene, when Madame Krasinska recognizes her to be the real
167
Colby’s assessment of “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” is lukewarm. In her section on Vanitas, she writes,
that “[t]here is real humor in ‘Lady Tal’ and a general competence in the other stories in the collection” (190).
“What she promises in Vanitas is remote from what in fact she offers,” Colby continues, “One of the stories, ‘The
Legend of Madame Krasinska,’ does indeed introduce a wealthy and beautiful young widow who thoughtlessly
mocks a pathetic old mad woman by dressing like her at a costume ball. But immediately her frivolous act begins to
prey on her conscience, and after suffering temporary madness and a suicide attempt, she renounces society and
becomes a nun” (192). Colby reads Madame Krasinska as a madwoman, not as a haunted woman whose
consciousness is inhabited by Sora Lena, and this is a crucial difference between our interpretations.
219
person she sees and hears, and when she acquires Cecchino’s sketch. Because Sora Lena first
appears to us as a face in the sketch and as a collection of disembodied clothes (crinoline, a
petticoat, a muff, a silk shirt, a satin bonnet, prunella boots, and, perhaps most hauntingly, a
voice), she seems already to be a ghost of herself, though she is still alive. Madame Krasinska’s
identity as a conspicuous patron of the arts is crucial, then, since her possession of the sketch
(and, in turn, Sora Lena’s possession of her consciousness) forces her to contend with the stories
and the histories that Sora Lena experienced firsthand. Sora Lena is and isn’t a typical ghost,
then, for as Pulham argues, Lee’s ghosts rarely take the shape of predictable bodily forms.
Instead, they are often artistic or aesthetic representations of human beings: “They often appear
in the guise of ghostly singers, metamorphic sculptures, strange, uncanny dolls, or as portraits
that come to life” (Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales
xvi). Cecchino’s sketch belongs to this curiosity cabinet of not-quite-human-beings and notquite-ghosts. And though Madame Krasinska herself does not anticipate the ways that the
acquisition of this sketch will determine and reshape her life, Lee’s foreboding tone in one of the
first scenes draws attention to Sora Lena’s phantom omnipresence among the artists, their
patrons, and even the most casual Florentine tourists.
Like the Botticellis, the Giottos, and the Michelangelos that fill the Florentine museums,
“the Sora Lena” (a moniker characters apply both to the woman and to the sketch) is an
attraction visitors inevitably see during their tours of the city. “The sketch might have passed for
a caricature,” Cecchino thinks to himself, “but anyone who had spent so little as a week in
Florence those six or seven years ago would have recognized at once that it was merely a faithful
portrait” (Lee, “Legend” 156). Cecchino’s early meditation on “the Sora Lena” underscores one
of her defining characteristics: she is both familiar and unfamiliar to everyone in Florence; and
220
though people don’t seem to think much about the life she’s led, they claim to know her because
they know her face. Still, what does Cecchino mean when he thinks to himself that this is
“merely a faithful portrait”? By calling the sketch “a caricature,” Lee’s narrator reveals
Cecchino’s predilection for representations that are unstated or understated or vague—but also
exaggerated. Though Cecchino never admits that this sketch is meant to mock Sora Lena, Lee’s
narrative shows how he has come to think of her as somebody who is reproducible through parts,
often exaggerated parts.168
Since the caricature is an act of interpretation, the artist must choose which features to
include and which not to include; those he does include are often unflatteringly larger-than-life.
Though Cecchino may not be willing to claim that this sketch is unflattering, Lee’s narrative
shows how he returns insistently to certain details that render Sora Lena pathetic. When the
Baroness Fosca and Madame Krasinska visit Cecchino at his studio, he shows how casually
invested he’s become in studying Sora Lena’s character. Lee’s narrative moves in and out of the
other characters’ immediate conversations but always returns to Cecchino’s interior monologue
about Sora Lena’s personal history. Once he sees Madame Krasinska glance at “the Sora Lena,”
he describes her to himself in caricature-like terms:
In all weathers you might have seen that hulking old woman, with her vague,
staring, reddish face, trudging through the streets or standing before shops, in her
extraordinary costume of thirty years ago, her enormous crinoline, on which the
silk skirt and ragged petticoat hung limply, her gigantic coal-scuttle bonnet,
168
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, caricatures have been associated with “ludicrous” and with
“grotesque” exaggeration since the mid-eighteenth century. The first definition, which dates to 1827, reads:
“Grotesque or ludicrous representation of persons or things by exaggeration of their most characteristic and striking
features.” The second, which dates to 1748, reads: “A portrait or other artistic representation, in which the
characteristic features of the original are exaggerated with ludicrous effect.” The third, which dates to 1767, reads:
“An exaggerated or debased likeness, imitation, or copy, naturally or unintentionally ludicrous.”
221
shawl, prunella boots, and great muff or parasol; one of several outfits, all alike,
of that distant period, all alike inexpressibly dirty and tattered. In all weathers
you might have seen her stolidly going her way, indifferent to stares and jibes, of
which, indeed, there were by this time comparatively few, so familiar had she
grown to staring, jibing Florence. In all weathers, but most noticeably in the
worst, as if the squalor of mud and rain had an affinity with that sad, draggled,
soiled, battered piece of human squalor, that lamentable rag of half-witted misery.
(156–157)
By revealing Cecchino’s thoughts, Lee discloses the well-known features he likely had in mind
when he sketched her face. Though we cannot know what the sketch really looks like, the
exaggerations and the repetitions within this paragraph enact the caricature mode Cecchino
acknowledges when he describes how easy it is for people to identify “the Sora Lena.” Many of
the words and the phrases Cecchino thinks to himself here reappear in later descriptions, so that
this paragraph becomes readers’ touchstone of the woman in the sketch. Even the anaphora, “In
all weathers you might . . . ,” “In all weathers you might . . . ,” which has nothing to do with Sora
Lena herself, gestures to the importance of repetition to identifying the woman, and people’s
imaginative descriptions, representations, or interpretations of her. Her dated clothing and tired
person are, for Cecchino, interesting in part because of their predictability. She is defined by
echoes, not only because she’s known now for her outmoded patriotic songs, but also because
Cecchino describes her through his own rhetorical iterations. Ultimately, the narrative’s
rendering of Cecchino’s “caricature” becomes the mnemonic through which the Baroness Fosca,
Madame Krasinska, and even Lee’s readers come to visualize the woman.
222
Long before we read the conversation in which Cecchino describes Sora Lena to Madame
Krasinska, then, we read his own internalized ideas about her. In this way, we are privy to “the
legend” before Madame Krasinska, and when we overhear or overread him telling her
information we already know, the legendary quality seems all the more legendary. Madame
Krasinska’s first utterance in the story is an unanswered question she asks Cecchino just as the
Baroness Fosca announces her comic costume ball: “‘Do tell me all about her;—has she a
name? Is she really a lunatic?’ asked the young lady who had been introduced as Madame
Krasinska, keeping a portfolio open with one hand, and holding up in the other a colored sketch
she had taken from it” (155). The narrative records Cecchino’s awkward silence by relaying
what he immediately thinks, not what he immediately says: the “In all weathers . . . ” paragraph.
In effect, the narrative hushes Cecchino’s conversations with the Baroness Fosca and with
Madame Krasinska and moves further and further into his mind. Indeed, as soon as Lee’s
narrative shows how Cecchino imagines Sora Lena, Madame Krasinska asks, again, who she is
and what she is like: “‘I have noticed her so often,’ she went on, with that silvery young voice of
hers; ‘she’s mad, isn’t she? And what did you say her name was? Please tell me again’” (156).
During moments when he withholds immediate descriptions of Sora Lena, the exposition of the
plot relies on information we glean through Cecchino’s interiority. Without his visual
interpretation of Sora Lena’s history, she would just be a woman with a face people seem to
recognize.
When Cecchino tells Madame Krasinska about Sora Lena, finally, the conversation
seems almost redundant, since the narrator has already made us privy to his mental images of
her. “There is a legend about her,” Cecchino tells Madame Krasinska, “they say that she was
once sane, and had two sons, who went as Volunteers in ’59, and were killed at Solferino, and
223
ever since then she has sallied forth, every day, winter or summer, in her best clothes, to meet the
young fellows at the Station. May be. To my mind it doesn’t matter much whether the story be
true or false; it is fitting’” (157). For Cecchino, the legend’s poignancy lies in its “fittingness”;
his project is, then, one of curatorial historicization. Unlike the perhaps-American, perhapsPolish Madame Krasinska, the Italian Cecchino remembers Sora Lena’s mid-nineteenth-century
experiences empathetically: they are both Florentines. Still, just as Cecchino acknowledges that
his understanding of Sora Lena is defined by a mix of public and private inventions and a mix of
knowns and unknowns, the sketch he draws of her works by highlighting idiosyncratic details
and (perhaps conspicuously) withholding many less subtle features. Maxwell and Pulham might
argue that Cecchino’s self-conscious choices (what to include and what not to include in his
portrait) connect him to figures in Lee’s other fantastic tales, since they underscore the ways
artists and writers often represent ghostly figures through narrative/metanarrative elision: “The
imaginative suggestiveness of the supernatural, which makes one find a crude sketch more
haunting than a finished masterpiece, finds its way into Lee’s stories where ghostly projections
are cued or triggered by blurring, breaks, gaps, fissures, ruins, relics, and fragments. […] her
ghosts are born out of suggestions, mental oddments, mnemonic bits and pieces” (Maxwell and
Pulham 13). Lee herself theorizes the fittingness of such uncertainties when she writes that if art
is to represent the supernatural, then it must necessarily be unfinished, for the tensions between
embodiment and disembodiment, certainty and uncertainty are what give ghosts their spectral
potential.169
169
Lee argues that “[. . . ] the more complete the artistic work, the less remains of the ghost. Why do these stories
affect us most in which the ghost is heard but not seen? Why do these places affect us most of which we merely
vaguely know that they are haunted?” (Lee, “Faustus and Helena” 310). For a fuller discussion of this point, see her
essay, “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art” (from Belcaro, 1880, 1881).
224
Yet there may be subtle suggestions that Cecchino’s ambivalence about the source of
Sora Lena’s sadness isn’t as detached as he’d like to think. When Madame Krasinska asks
Cecchino, again, who the woman in the sketch is, he responds, “‘What have you got there? Oh
only the Sora Lena!’” (Lee, “Legend” 156, 155). Just as the word “merely” (“it was merely a
faithful portrait”) belittles the sketch, the word “only” suggests that this woman, or his sketch of
this woman, is at once legendary and forgettable or easily dismissed. Ultimately, Cecchino
decides to tell Madame Krasinska Sora Lena’s story because he thinks her interest in the sketch
is a mark of good taste: “No woman of another class would have picked out just that drawing, or
would have been interested it in without stupid laughter” (156). In spite of his prideful
understatements, Cecchino seems to understand that this sketch has the potential to be
misinterpreted by people too rude or too uncultivated—or even too poor—to understand the
“fittingness” of Sora Lena’s story.
The conversation that ensues is punctuated by Cecchino’s nervous repetitions and
Madame Krasinska’s nervous silence. “‘Do you want to know the story of poor old Sora
Lena?’” Cecchino asks, “taking the sketch from Madame Krasinska’s hand, and looking over it
at the charming, eager young face” (156). “‘Do you want to know about Sora Lena?’” Cecchino
insistently asks (157). Once Cecchino tells Madame Krasinska about Sora Lena’s past, she
becomes even more interested in the sketch, but manners prevent her from asking the price.
Before the women leave Cecchino’s studio, though, the Baroness Fosca intercedes: “‘Madame
Krasinska,’ she said laughing, ‘is very desirous of possessing one of your sketches, but she is too
polite to ask you the price of it. That’s what comes of our not knowing how to earn a penny for
ourselves, doesn’t it, Signor Cecchino?” (157). Next to Cecchino’s premonition that Madame
Krasinska is a woman of good taste because she isn’t “laughing,” the Baroness Fosca’s
225
“laughter” seems forebodingly cruel. For the Baroness Fosca, Madame Krasinska’s naïveté is
charming. “‘I did not know whether you would consent to part with one of your drawings,’”
Madame Krasinska continues, “in her silvery, childlike voice,—‘it is—this one—which should
so much have liked to have———to have———bought’’ (157–158). Madame Krasinska’s
hesitating stutters tellingly anticipate the afterlife of the sketch once it’s in her hands. Lee’s
dashes materialize two ideas that govern the rest of the story: the theme of ineffability and the
theme of possession (meaning both to obtain something and to be haunted by someone). The
striking difference between Cecchino’s repetitions (“Do you want to know”) and Madame
Krasinska’s repetitions (“to have———”) suggest that their class positions determine what each
wants to do with Sora Lena’s legend; the nearness of these repetitions suggests that little
separates having, knowing, and possessing.
Once Cecchino gives Madame Krasinska “the Sora Lena,” he begins to think of the two
women in terms of superimpositions or matryoshka-like layerings, and he often imagines them
fading into one another through the sketch and the muff they both wear. “‘Thank you so much,’”
Madame Krasinska tells Cecchino, “slipping the drawing into her muff; ‘it is very good of you to
give me such a———such a very interesting sketch,’ and she pressed his big, brown fingers in
her little grey-gloved hand” (158). Madame Krasinska’s characteristically halting speech,
coupled with the fact that she places the sketch in her muff (also part of Sora Lena’s
“extraordinary costume of thirty year’s ago”), makes this moment melodramatically symbolic.
By folding the sketch into her muff, Madame Krasinska wears “the Sora Lena,” and she even
begins to subsume the defining attributes of Cecchino’s caricature within her person. While
Cecchino perceives the two women as shockingly different, it’s clear that he’s ultimately struck
by their uncanny parallels: “They formed a strange, strange contrast, these two women, the one
226
in the sketch and the one standing before him. And there was to him a pathetic whimsicalness in
the interest which the one had excited in the other” (157). For if Sora Lena’s muff is part of her
“extraordinary costume,” then it’s telling that Madame Krasinska places the sketch into her own
muff before leaving the studio. Though Cecchino can’t know that she plans to wear the sketch as
a mask when she attends the Baroness Fosca’s comic costume ball, it’s clear he sees the
symbolic potential in the two muffs. Indeed, the narrative connections among Sora Lena’s muff,
Madame Krasinska’s muff, and the sketch as a secreted text linguistically tease toward the theme
of hushed resonances between past and present.170 Just as we never hear or read the lyrics to
Garibaldi’s hymn in the text of the story, Madame Krasinska’s conspicuous placement of the
sketch within the muff suggest the manner in which crucial images become narratively muffled.
Lee’s narrator reveals that Madame Krasinska’s interest in Sora Lena isn’t as artless as
Cecchino once thought. Two weeks after visiting his studio, Madame Krasinska impersonates
the old woman at the Baroness Fosca’s comic costume ball. She wears crinoline, a petticoat, a
muff, a silk shirt, a satin bonnet, and prunella boots.171 She also wears the sketch as a mask.
Cecchino remembers being impressed by Madame Krasinska’s “sensitiveness” and “rapid
intuition,” which he considered to be an almost Paterian appreciation (156). Just before seeing
Madame Krasinska impersonating Sora Lena, he thinks to himself that “there is no pleasure so
delicious as seeing people amusing themselves with refinement: there is a transfiguring magic,
170
Near the end of the story, Lee describes the muff Sora Lena’s sons bought for her: “They never cost their
mother a farthing, once they were sixteen and Momino bought her a big, beautiful muff out of his own earnings as a
pupil-teacher. Here it is! Such a comfort in the cold weather, you can’t think, especially when gloves are too dear.
Yes, it is rabbit-skin, but it is made to look like ermine, quite a handsome article” (176).
171
Lee calls Madame Krasinska an “impersonation of youthful brightness” during the scene at the study; the word
“impersonation” meaningfully confuses Sora Lena’s “costume,” Madame Krasinska’s “costume,” and the identity
crises that ensue over her embodied/disembodied “person” throughout the story. Cecchino notes, “[s]he spoke
French, but with a pretty little American accent, despite her Polish name. She was very charming, Cecchino said to
himself, a radiant impersonation of youthful brightness and elegance as she stood there in her long, silvery furs,
holding the drawing with tiny tight-gloved hands, and shedding around her a vague, exquisite fragrance—no, not a
mere literal perfume, that would be far too coarse but something personal akin to it” (155–156).
227
almost a moralizing power, in wealth and elegance and good-breeding” (161). Of course, there
is little “moralizing power” in Madame Krasinska’s impersonation of Sora Lena, and Cecchino
regrets this assumption as soon as he sees her. Still, his initial ideas about the “transfiguring”
potential of art and artistic appreciation echo Pater’s language in the “Conclusion” to The
Renaissance. “Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or
the sea choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is
irresistibly real and attractive to us,” Pater writes, “—for that moment only” (Pater 152). By
pausing the sentence with a comma and a dash, he emphasizes the ungraspable quality of the
immediate moment, which Cecchino seems to understand in the “strange” superimposition he
discerns between Sora Lena and Madame Krasinska at the moment when she takes the sketch.
Cecchino imagines that Madame Krasinska sees something or someone “irresistibly real” in the
face he’s drawn and that this sketch of Sora Lena demonstrates the ways art, even his art, can
“unite” “vital forces” belonging to “two women” who form, after this moment, “a strange,
strange contrast” in his mind.
Cecchino’s judgment of her—as well as of his own—subjective discernment changes
after the costume ball. While Cecchino first found Madame Krasinska’s attraction to “the Sora
Lena” to be almost noble, because she seemed to lose herself in an intense, almost Paterian,
moment of appreciation, he realizes that her interest in “the Sora Lena” (both the person and the
sketch) was, in fact, perverse.172 Madame Krasinska’s interest in Sora Lena is, then, a
172
A contemporary parallel may be the amateur souvenirs tourists make when they photograph old men, old
women, and begging children in third-world countries. When photographers document these people, they seem to
do so exactly because the pain they imagine in their subjects is so foreign; but they often seem to recognize, too, that
this poverty may be beautiful (even uncomfortably beautiful) to certain eyes, and such recordings are a mark of
humanitarian sophistication. Indeed, these seeming efforts to understand and to represent these people are also
deliberate aesthetic acts. Pierre Bourdieu is just one philosopher who describes this decidedly classed phenomenon.
In Distinction, he shows how people with highbrow taste prefer cabbage heads, car wrecks, or tree bark over much
more predictable subjects (such as sunsets, girls with kittens, or first communion portraits) (Bourdieu 59, 526).
Tellingly, as we shall see, still life paintings belong somewhere between high- and lowbrow taste among Bourdieu’s
228
completely un-self-conscious act. When she uses the sketch as a mask, she’s not expressing an
appreciation (aesthetic or otherwise) for “the Sora Lena”; she’s mocking her with a flippancy
even Cecchino could not have anticipated.173
In retrospect, Cecchino realizes that Madame Krasinska’s penchant for discerning
interesting from uninteresting art was probably just a display of highbrow impulsiveness:
Cecchino knowingly confides in Madame Krasinska that “‘luxury can give people certain kinds
of sensitiveness, of rapid intuition’” (156). But Cecchino’s “intuition” is, as much as Madame
Krasinska’s, the source of crisis in Lee’s story: he realizes that he’s underestimated Madame
Krasinska just as she’s underestimated Sora Lena. “Why had he not guessed it at once?” he
wonders after the costume ball, “What on earth else could she have wanted his sketch for?”
(162). Indeed, just moments before Madame Krasinska appears as Sora Lena, he thinks to
himself: “There were, of course, a few costumes which might have been better conceived or
better carried out, or better—not to say best—omitted altogether” (160). Still, Cecchino
catalogues the “comic costumes” he sees at the Baroness Fosca’s masquerade just moments
before Madame Krasinska appears:
One grew bored, after a little while, with people dressed as marionettes,
champagne bottles, sticks of sealing wax, or captive balloons; a young man
arrayed as a female ballet dancer, and another got up as a wet nurse, with baby
interviewees. Like the people Bourdieu interviews, Madame Krasinska seems to intuit that her interest in “the Sora
Lena” may be understood as a mark of distinction among the Florentine well-to-do.
173
Kristin Mahoney pithily addresses the manner in which Lee’s ghost stories reconcile Ruskinian and Paterian
aesthetics. The horror Cecchino experiences in the face of the impersonation seems to fictionalize many decadenceera critiques leveled against Ruskin and Pater. Mahoney’s conclusions may be helpful for understanding Cecchino’s
own desires to cultivate an appreciation for art/artistic subjects that is humane. “As her aesthetic thinking develops,”
Mahoney writes, “she moves toward a reconciliation between Ruskinian morality and the particular brand of
Paterian aestheticism articulated in the “Conclusion” to The Renaissance. […] it might be even more accurate to say
that Lee ended as an ethical aesthete, as a moral hedonist” (Mahoney 43). Indeed, Madame Krasinska is
transformed, by the end of the story, from “Madame Krasinska” to “Sora Lena” to a nun. By reading Ruskin, Pater,
and Lee in conversation with one another, we may be better able to question how/why immediacy is necessarily
related to hedonism and how/why Madame Krasinska reconciles the desire to be amused, and to be amused at
someone else’s expense, with her increasingly fragile moral sensibility.
229
obligato might certainly have been dispensed with. Also, Cecchino could not
help wincing a little at the daughter of the house being mummed and painted to
represent her own grandmother, a respectable old lady whose picture hung in the
dining room, and whose spectacles he had frequently picked up in his boyhood.
But these were mere trifling details. And, as a whole, it was beautiful, fantastic.
(160)
Though he isn’t thinking, then, about Madame Krasinska, his opinion seems uncannily apt by the
end of the scene, when she emerges with “the Sora Lena” covering her face. He realizes, almost
immediately, that Madame Krasinska is not interested in “the Sora Lena” as a person or as a
sketch; instead, she appreciates Sora Lena’s face for its disposable potential. It’s a mask. Far
from demonstrating “sensitiveness,” then, Madame Krasinska’s impersonation shows how truly
unfeeling she was before and after her possession of “the Sora Lena” (156).
Yet soon after impersonating Sora Lena at the masquerade, Madame Krasinska is
overwhelmed by ambivalent sadness, and she finds herself yearning for something or someone
she doesn’t remember losing. “It was not,” Lee writes, “melancholy or listlessness such as other
women complained of. They seemed, in their fits of blues, to feel that the world was going out
of its way to annoy them. But Madame Krasinska saw the world quite plainly, proceeding in the
usual manner, and being quite as good a world as before. It was she who was all wrong” (169).
Her friends and servants worry about her ambivalent “listlessness”; and even Madame Krasinska
acknowledges, “she did not seem to be herself any longer,” precisely because of this new state of
mind (168, 169). Immediately after the comic costume ball, the narrative delves more and more
deeply into Madame Krasinska’s mind, and though her world-weariness is elusive, she still
enumerates the things she’s decidedly not feeling: “Other women, she knew, had innumerable
230
subjects of wretchedness; or if they had none, they were wretched from the want of them. Some
had children who made them unhappy, others were unhappy for lack of children, and similarly as
to lovers; but she had never had a child and never had a lover, and never experienced the
smallest desire for either” (164). It’s telling that she lingers over her childlessness, because this
is the most important difference between the two women’s life experiences. The peculiar
behaviors she adopts in subsequent scenes are defined by rites of grieving for her ghost’s
phantom children, who become, in turn, her own phantom children.
Still, Madame Krasinska feels drawn to the river bank, the chemist shop, and the railway
station, places Sora Lena had famously haunted since 1859, but she doesn’t, at first, identify with
Sora Lena. Madame Krasinska also finds herself humming Garibaldi’s hymn before guests, who
hear in her voice reverberations of Sora Lena’s funerary marches through Florence during the
1860s, the 1870s, and the 1880s in the wake of her two sons’ deaths. Even as she observes these
rites of grieving, though, she doesn’t acknowledge the change within herself, at least at first,
even though she realizes that she no longer sees or hears Sora Lena in the streets. It’s clear, in
fact, that Madame Krasinska suspects something has happened to Sora Lena, since she is drawn
to the river bank, the chemist shop, and the railway station not only because she may be
inspirited by Sora Lena’s ghost but also because she is hoping (guiltily) to find the woman there.
Because she pretends to herself that doesn’t understand these almost out-of-body impulses, her
ghost—and her ghost’s ghosts—continue to elude her.
Lee’s narrator describes the disorientation Madame Krasinska feels when she finds
herself “aimlessly” drawn to Sora Lena’s legendary haunts:
What did she want? Madame Krasinska was not in the habit of driving out in the
rain for her pleasure; still less to drive out without knowing wither. What did she
231
want? She sat muffled in her furs, looking out on the wet, grey streets as the
brougham rolled aimlessly along. She wanted—she wanted—she couldn’t tell
what. But she wanted it very much. That much she knew very well—she wanted.
(165)
Though she cannot put words to her thoughts, Madame Krasinska nevertheless experiences the
same untellable longing she struggles to articulate during her visit to the studio. This ineffable
horror echoes the theme of possession so striking to Cecchino in the opening scene, for the
repetition of “what did she want,” “she wanted—,” “she wanted—,” also echoes “to
have———,” “to have———.” For just as she struggles to express (politely) her desire to
possess “the Sora Lena,” she also struggles to comprehend what/who now possesses her over the
rest of the story.
Once a connoisseur within the Baroness Fosca’s cosmopolitan circle, Madame Krasinska
becomes the subject of salon tittle-tattle and is presumed to be losing her mind, just as Sora Lena
was. Narratively, it’s clear that this is a ghost story, and Sora Lena is haunting Madame
Krasinska, but she appears oblivious to, or in denial about, the consequences of her
impersonation. Though possessed, she seems to be strangely unsuspecting of her ghost: she
doesn’t understand why she mouths these words or why she feels drawn to these places. Over
the next days and weeks, Madame Krasinska thinks of Sora Lena’s dislocated person cavalierly,
remembering on occasion that she hasn’t heard the woman singing at the river bank or the
railway station.174
174
John Auchard compares the Florentine river bank to the Venetian lagoon in his introduction to James’s Italian
Hours, and he argues that the river bank is as fraught as the lagoon within Anglo-Italian cultural vernaculars: “Little
there so sadly struck the note of oblivion as did the Florentine houses James saw backing onto the Arno. . . .
Florence had not known preeminence since the Renaissance, but its physical decline, infinitely more dreary than that
of Venice, rarely worked as a metaphor and rarely called up many mournful associations. Over the centuries, time
and the Florentine river had caused as much pervasive destruction as had the Venetian lagoon, but tradition has been
that death rarely comes, to foreigners at least, in Florence. The reason was partly because travelers to Florence
232
In fact, the day after the Baroness Fosca’s comic costume ball, Sora Lena’s face, the
sketch-turned-mask, remains wrinkled in a chair in the corner of Madame Krasinska’s boudoir.
“As her maid was taking her out of her dress,” Lee writes, “a thought—the first since so long—
flashed across her mind, at the sight of certain skirts, and an uncouth cardboard mask, lying in a
corner of her dressing-room. How odd that she had not seen the Sora Lena that evening … She
always used to be walking in the lit streets at that hour” (166–167). It’s clear Madame Krasinska
is lying to herself, for she had impersonated Sora Lena the night before. While the mask is just a
paper face, even Madame Krasinska seems to recognize that it is a human representation, and it
teases uncomfortable lines between embodied and disembodied being. Madame Krasinska’s
mask represents the existential category Barbara Johnson describes when she distinguishes
things and persons from what she terms “non-persons” and the one Sharon Cameron gestures
toward when she asks when the im in “impersonality” is or means (Johnson 1–2; Cameron viii–
ix). Johnson’s “non-persons” and Cameron’s “impersonality” suggest lingering identities as
much as they do absences. For while the im of impersonality and impersonation prefixes
negation, it also signifies inwardness, incorporation of an outside person or an outside
personality within the living subject (Cameron ix).
In Impersonality, Cameron studies “the precariousness of personal identity measured at
the moment of its disintegration,” and across her collection of essays, she shows how particular
writers “address the making and unmaking of personality” (viii). “One way of approaching
impersonality,” Cameron continues, “is to say it is not the negation of the person, but rather a
penetration through or a falling outside of the boundary of the human particular. Impersonality
anticipated art, much of it religious art, and some salon society. Throughout the eighteenth century, however,
visitors to Venice had expected a more energetic program, one of beauty, of vibrant pleasure, and of intense
carnival, which, as James reports from the Président de Brosses, lasted six months” (xvii–xviii). Sora Lena, of
course, reverses Auchard’s reading of the river bank and the lagoon in James’s canon.
233
disrupts elementary categories we suppose to be fundamental to specifying human
distinctiveness. Or rather, we don’t know what the im of impersonality means” (ix). Johnson
similarly addresses this problem of “specifying human distinctiveness” when she argues in her
book Persons and Things that between a person and a thing exists another crucial category—a
non-person. Johnson shows how this category may be difficult to define but also how that
category informs our ideas about the ways we behave humanely. “The difficulties of
establishing proper definitions of ‘person’ and ‘thing’” are, Johnson writes, “at the heart of this
study. But one caveat can be formulated: something defined as not one of them is not therefore
the other. It is important to explore the category of non-person separately from that of thing,”
because, as we learn in “The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” “the Sora Lena” is both a woman
and a sketch (Johnson 2).175 By appropriating the dismembered face, Madame Krasinska must
come to terms with a new identity that both is and isn’t her old self.
Cast aside, the sketch-mask of Sora Lena’s face appears as an eerie fictional articulation
of Johnson’s and Cameron’s ideas, for without the cruel animating potential afforded by
Madame Krasinska’s bodily frame, Sora-Lena-the-mask appears as a sort of non-person, a sort of
impersonality, an antithesis of her once-living self. Madame Krasinska’s half-hearted curiosity
about the mask of Sora Lena and about Sora-Lena-the-person in the boudoir scene hypostatize
the twofold meaning of the prefix im: the sketch-mask effaces Sora Lena’s humanness and,
simultaneously, marks Madame Krasinska’s heightened self-consciousness. When she sees her
abandoned persona, Madame Krasinska realizes that this once amusing costume is “uncouth,”
and her mind doesn’t work as quickly as she remembered (Lee, “Legend” 166). Madame
175
“The more I thought about this asymptotic relation between things and persons,” Johnson writes, “the more I
realized that the problem is not, as it seems, a desire to treat things as persons but a difficulty in being sure that we
treat persons as persons. In other words, the relations between persons and things might be the norm in human
relations already and not the object of an impossible quest. A study of persons and things might reveal all of the
ways we already treat persons as things, and how humanness is mired in an inability to do otherwise” (Johnson 2).
234
Krasinska’s response to the cardboard face shows how her unease isn’t predicated on the
question of whether she does or doesn’t believe in spirits, or on the ghost’s mysterious identity
(she know it’s Sora Lena), but rather on the ways the ghost changes how she thinks, feels, and
conceives of herself as a person.
The sketch-turned-mask she leaves in her boudoir after the masquerade materializes a
tension between embodied and disembodied identity, something Cecchino worries about the
morning after the costume ball. While reading the newspaper, he sees that right beneath
accounts of the costume ball (and perhaps even of the impersonation) is a report of a woman’s
suicide; the woman, not identified by name, is clearly Sora Lena. Cecchino finds the notice of
Sora Lena’s death among reports of accidents and missing objects (an umbrella, keys, cigarcases):
“This morning the Guardians of Public Safety, having been called by the
neighboring inhabitants, penetrated into a room on the top floor of a house situate
in the Little Street of the Gravedigger (Viccolo del Beccamorto), and discovered,
hanging from a rafter, the dead body of Madalena X.Y.Z. The deceased had long
been noted throughout Florence for her eccentric habits and apparel.” The
paragraph was headed, in somewhat larger type: “Suicide of a female lunatic.”
(162–163)
The journalist’s rendering of Sora Lena reiterates the details Cecchino tells Madame Krasinska
in the beginning of the story and that have become Sora Lena’s identifying narrative marks.
“Madalena X.Y.Z.” becomes an anonymous signification for conclusions, not only because the
letters politely mask her identity, even as a dead woman, but also because she is named for the
end of the alphabet.
235
For Cecchino, the juxtaposition of the two stories in the newspaper is horrifying,
especially since Lee shows how the artist has been thinking of the two women in terms of
superimposition through things such as the sketch, the muff, and the gloves: after relinquishing
his sketch at his studio, he sees Sora Lena in Madame Krasinska and Madame Krasinska in Sora
Lena. Though he doesn’t know with certaintly Madame Krasinska killed Sora Lena by wearing
the sketch-mask, the narrator suggests he also doesn’t think it’s mere happenstance that the
suicide and the impersonation take place on exactly the same night. For Cecchino, the
coincidence suggests the sinister potential of costumes, masks, and impersonation; and he seems
to realize that if Madame Krasinska’s performance was a tableau vivant, then the “transfiguring”
moment may have inadvertently dramatized Sora Lena’s soon-to-be suicide as much as it
dramatized the static life she led.176 For Cecchino, the sketch-turned-mask renders Madame
Krasinska an unwitting effigy of Sora Lena and the tableau vivant an unwitting still life.
The narrator’s description of Madame Krasinska’s impersonation is self-consciously
melodramatic and blurs the lines between Cecchino’s vision of Sora Lena as a person and as a
thing (a sketch, a mask). Lee writes,
A little gangway was cleared; and there walked into the middle of the white and
gold drawing room, a lumbering, hideous figure, with reddish, vacant face, sunk
in an immense, tarnished satin bonnet; and draggled, faded, lilac skirts spread
over a vast dislocated crinoline. The feet dabbed along in the broken prunella
boots; the mangy rabbit-skin muff bobbed loosely with the shambling gait; and
176
It’s worth noting that when Madame Krasinska claims Sora Lena as her ghost, she names the sketch-mask, not of
the woman. “‘Ah, I am she—I am she—I am mad!’” Lee writes, “For in that sudden voice, so different from her
own, Madame Krasinska had recognized the voice that should have issued from the cardboard mask she had once
worn, the voice of Sora Lena” (178).
236
then, under the big chandelier, there came a sudden pause, and the thing looked
slowly round, a gaping, mooning, blear-eyed stare.
It was the Sora Lena.
There was a perfect storm of applause. (161)
Madame Krasinska’s quiet performance at the ball underscores the theme of mutedness, and it
works on several levels. On one level, Madame Krasinska’s silence may be read as an
unwittingly brilliant comment on Sora Lena’s social position: though she’s famous for her
singing, we never read or hear the words to her signature songs. One another level, Madame
Krasinska’s “costume” depends upon a successful performance of her own halting speech.
In this way, even during the moment of the impersonation, Madame Krasinska and Sora
Lena become one in ineffable drama. The unmoving cardboard lips of the sketch-mask before
her face suggest the ways the ghosts of texts (the caricature, the newspaper, the songs) constitute
Lee’s narrative hauntings. The mutedness of this scene is all the more striking next to the
theatrically drawn-out exposition: the breaks introduce “the Sora Lena” and the applause as
paragraphs that stand on their own. Because Cecchino is the person who originally made what
came to be the mask, he feels guilty. In trying to give form to the formless, as Lee describes in
her “Notes on the Supernatural in Art, ” he assumes the role of ghost-seer (like all artists who
produce rough arts, such as sketches). Cecchino, in fact, is the first to recognize the cruelty of
Madame Krasinska’s interpretation, based on his own, and he worries that this strange
coincidence may be much more damning than she might imagine. While Cecchino temporarily
drops out of the narrative once he’s read the newspaper, his final premonition points to the
morbid potential of a sketch he created, off-hand, years and years ago.
237
Cecchino’s disappearance from the narrative, coupled with his horror upon reading Sora
Lena’s obituary, suggest the ways he appears as Lee’s unwitting elegist. Though the sketch itself
isn’t an intentional commemoration of her life or of her death, it memorializes Sora Lena’s place
within the Florentine collective consciousness. The sketch-mask becomes tantamount to the
muff or the gloves or the boots she wore, and it is the closest thing to an actual bodily
representation. Indeed, the cardboard face seems to materialize, even to Madame Krasinska, the
fragility of human life. Vanitas (the title of the collection in which this story was published) are,
in fact, paintings that meditate on life’s ephemerality. Popular during the sixteenth and the
seventeenth centuries, this still-life genre often depicted the inevitability of death through images
of decaying things—skulls, withering flowers, over-ripened fruit—represented as objets d′art.
Ultimately, vanitas are called vanitas because both the decaying things and the composed
aestheticization of these decaying things represent the “emptiness” of earthly life (the Latin
vanitas may be translated as emptiness or meaninglessness in English). The word may be an
allusion to the Ecclesiastes verse, “vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas,” which means “emptiness
of emptinesses, everything is empty” or “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” (De Pascale 99–101). Pater
famously terms this morbid self-consciousness “that continual vanishing away, that strange,
perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves,” and he suggests that people often realize this
state through moment-to-moment impressions of “external things” (151).
Lee’s “Notes on the Supernatural in Art,” published exactly one decade after the first
edition of Pater’s The Renaissance, theorizes the relationship between impressions and the
necessary vagueness of thinking and feeling selves:
it is the effect on the imagination of certain external impressions, it is those
impressions brought to a focus, personified, but personified vaguely, in a
238
fluctuating ever-changing manner; the personification being continually altered,
reinforced, blurred out, enlarged, restricted by new series of impressions from
without, even as the shape which we puzzle out of congregated cloud-masses
fluctuates with their every movement—a shifting vapour now obliterates the
form, now compresses it into greater distinctness. (Lee, “Faustus and Helena”
296–297)
For Cecchino, then, the sketch-turned-mask becomes a still life, and it represents Madame
Krasinska’s “continual vanishing” as much as it represents Sora Lena’s. Madame Krasinska
thinks something similar to herself: “It was, in the literal sense of the words, what she supposed
people might mean when they said that So-and-so was not himself, only that So-and-so, on
examination, appeared to be very much himself—only himself in a worse temper than usual.
Whereas she … Why, in her case, she really did not seem to be herself any longer” (169).177
Just as Lee’s title dramatizes the almost mystical tension between self-abnegation and
vanity, Lee juxtaposes Sora Lena’s suicide with Madame Krasinska’s impersonation. The
sketch-turned-mask reifies life’s passing from one woman to another. For Cecchino, the eeriness
lies not in the fact that Madame Krasinska assumes the persona, but in the fact that she assumes
the persona just after Sora Lena kills herself. That Sora Lena’s suicide, the ultimate act of
negation, coincides with Madame Krasinska’s impersonation, a dramatization of the “weaving”
and the “unweaving” of self, suggests the perversity inherent in aesthetic transfigurations. In
“The Conclusion” to The Renaissance, Pater shows how this negation or abnegation is crucial if
“the thick wall of personality” is to be affected by potentially transformative stimuli:
177
In theorizing the relationships among ghosts, hauntings, and aestheticism, Leighton likewise emphasizes the
manner in which the ghost-seer must trouble fundamental questions about what it means to be human: “The specter
focuses this trouble of belief. It is there and not there. It outlines emptiness but also fills it up, embodying and
disembodying its own reality at the same time” (1).
239
“Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by
that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or
from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without” (151). When the narrative cuts from
glimpses of Cecchino to glimpses of Madame Krasinska in subsequent paragraphs, it’s hard not
to read her melodramatic, uncharacteristic sadness through the revelation Cecchino has in the
aftermath of the comic costume ball, and his readerly epiphany becomes ours. At the moment of
her impersonation, Madame Krasinska becomes an apparition of the woman whose face she
wore in jest. While she prides herself on her even-temperedness, she experiences layers within
layers of grief in subsequent scenes: for Sora Lena, for the sons Sora Lena famously mourns,
and perhaps even for her own unmeaning self-effacement.
The narrative enacts this shift from person to person. For if this story turns on
impersonation—as a moment of realization, self-realization, transfiguration, or even death—then
it’s important that Lee’s narrative gestures toward rhetorical impersonation: free indirect
discourse. Both the plot and its exposition rely on modes of impersonation in which one
person’s mind subsumes another’s. Though the story begins with a narrator who claims to “have
abandoned the order of the narrative of the Little Sister of the Poor [Madame Krasinska]; and
attempted to turn her pious legend into a worldly story,” it often moves from this limited thirdperson perspective to a much more otherworldly exposition, free indirect discourse, both with
Cecchino and with Madame Krasinska (153). In this way, the narrator represents the
Risorgimento through Madame Krasinska’s memories and, implicitly, through Sora Lena’s
memories, but not through other people’s. Lee’s narrative choice is provocative, for in a text that
is both about and not about the Risorgimento, it’s surprising that representations of the war are
subject to characters who often experience alienating speechlessness. Indeed, the most detailed
240
representations of the war are filtered through Madame Krasinska’s/Sora Lena’s memories,
suggesting that this period is narratable only through madwomen whose “sensitive”
consciousnesses internalize the fragile line between tellable and untellable trauma, but also
between sanity and insanity.
The ultimate hauntings belong to Sora Lena, then, not to Madame Krasinska, since her
mind is the innermost center of consciousness. Her grief, which has become a joke among
Florentine society, may finally be taken seriously once the sketch is taken from the portfolio and
masqueraded as a costume. Madame Krasinska never had sons, but by the end of the story, she
experiences the grief ascribed to the singing madwoman, and it’s through this grief that she
realizes she has absorbed Sora Lena’s very consciousness. But whereas Cecchino sees an
immediate transfiguration, Madame Krasinska absorbs Sora Lena’s consciousness gradually and
almost imperceptively. In fact, she even absorbs Sora Lena’s self-abnegation because she thinks
of herself as nothing and nobody long before she identifies with Sora Lena: “Her mind would
become, every now and then, a blank; a blank at least full of vague images, misty and muddled,
which she was unable to grasp, but of which she knew that they were painful, weighing on her as
a heavy load must weigh on the head or back” (169). Lee narrates the madwomen’s
transfiguration through shifts in tenses and shifts in pronouns from the first to the third person;
and even the third-person pronouns often refer to both women at once. “Something had
happened, or was going to happen,” Lee continues, “she could not remember which, but she
burst into tears nonetheless” (169). Madame Krasinska’s foreboding strangely blurs tenses, since
it brings the past not just into the present but, perhaps much more unsettlingly, into a vague
future; her understanding of history is, then, achronological, and she often fears the outcomes of
things that have already happened.
241
Madame Krasinska begins to understand her hauntings both by acknowledging who she’s
not and what she’s not mourning, rather than thinking about them as ghostly entities on their
own. Lee shows how Madame Krasinska’s impersonation forces her to contend both with Sora
Lena and with the children Sora Lena mourned for the rest of her life. Sora Lena’s ghosts, then,
become Madame Krasinska’s ghosts, and the boys’ reality is, then, subject to this woman’s mind.
Sora Lena’s sons constitute a more lingering ghostly presence than she herself has on her ghostseer, since they never returned to Florence from Solferino. For as haunting as their deaths would
have been for Sora Lena, whose pain seems to be defined by their missing remains, they seem,
for Madame Krasinska, to represent the terrifying possibility that a body, even a body
dismembered in a battle, can become a spectre. Though she often imagines her sons’ unreturned
bodies in the battlefield at Solferino, she is forced to understand their deaths through a Keatsian
grasping: they are defined by her incomplete understandings and by their absences. Their
absences are all the more remarkable because we only know them as ghosts Madame Krasinska
encounters while she’s slipping further and further into Sora Lena’s mind. Lee’s narrator shows
how Madame Krasinska’s thoughts are increasingly punctuated by details of the boys’ day-today lives; more and more, she thinks about them with impossible familiarity, revealing their
names, a story about the vase they broke in the hallway, the book they kept on the table, the muff
they bought her with their own money.
As Madame Krasinska becomes haunted by Sora Lena, and the narrative moves further
and further into free indirect discourse, her memories become elliptical but also much more
vivid: “But still . . . What of those strange forebodings of evil, those muddled fears of some
dreadful calamity . . . something which had happened, or was going to happen . . . poverty,
starvation, death—whose death, her own? or someone else’s?” (173–174). Lee continues:
242
That knowledge that it was all, all over; that blinding, felling blow which used
every now and then to crush her . . . Yes, she had felt that first at the railway
station. At the station? but what had happened at the station? Or was it going to
happen still? Since to the station her feet seemed unconsciously to carry her
every day. What was it all? Ah! she knew. There was a woman, an old woman,
walking to the station to meet . . . Yes, to meet a regiment on its way back. They
came back, those soldiers, among a mob yelling triumph. She remembered the
illuminations, the red, green, and white lanterns, and those garlands all over the
waiting-rooms. So gaily! They played Garibaldi’s hymn and Addio, Mia Bella.
Those pieces always made her cry now. The station was crammed, and all the
boys, in tattered, soiled uniforms, rushed into the arms of parents, wives, friends.
(174)
These may be the most provocative hauntings in Lee’s stories, since they represent the otherwise
ineffable tension between what Madame Krasinska can and cannot know.
The boys’ lives are completely disembodied in the logic of the narrative. Unlike their
mother’s history, which is corroborated by Cecchino (or countless other people who have
encountered her at the river bank or at the railway station), there is no mythological precedent for
Momino and Temistocle. For as much as we know about the infamous madwoman, we don’t
know anything about her sons besides the details the narrator reveals through Madame
Krasinska’s consciousness; and these details suggest the ways that Madame Krasinska’s memory
absorbs Sora Lena’s. Whether these details are or aren’t the result of madness, Madame
Krasinska worries over them throughout the narrative, and they become unnervingly real to her.
Ultimately, these reveries may be the most distracted sentences in her narrative; but next to the
243
ambivalent state of mind she displays during the first days and weeks of her unraveling, they
may also be the most insistently vivid.178
Lee’s references to Momino, to Temistocle, and to Solferino record moments when
Madame Krasinska is most self-conscious about her familiarity/unfamiliarity with a past she
hasn’t experienced. Though Madame Krasinska and Sora Lena never meet face-to-face, Lee’s
narrative shows how Sora Lena affects Madame Krasinska’s understanding of cultural history.
“The Legend of Madame Krasinska,” should be read as an indictment of certain modes of public
memory. Indeed, if the past was, for Madame Krasinska and for the other expatriates, a joke, a
comic costume belonging to a woman who resisted the finality of her sons’ deaths, then Lee’s
ghost story shows how “impersonation” raises serious existential questions: can Madame
Krasinska really understand Sora Lena’s pain through an impersonation that renders her an objet
d’art (a sketch, a mask)?—how are Madame Krasinska’s and Sora Lena’s present-tense lives and
afterlives defined by earlier historical circumstances? Fluhr shows how inspirited narrators in
Lee’s Hauntings bring together past and present realities: “Through their relationships with
ghosts, the narrators are able to approach the past from the intimate perspective of another’s
consciousness, rather than from the distanced perspective of objective study” (289). If we apply
Fluhr’s narrative logic to this story, then we can understand Madame Krasinska’s cruel
impersonation as a damning historical corrective, one which allows the post-Risorgimento
generation to come to terms with their own vague memories.
178
It may be worth noting, too, that many of the historical referents in this passage echo Lee’s biographical
relationship to post-Risorgimento Florence: “By 1880, the year in which Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy
was published in England, there were important changes in the Paget family. Their wandering ended in 1873 when
they settled in Florence in a house near the Arno at 12 via Solferino. In early 1882 they moved to 5 via Garibaldi,
then in the spring of 1889 to a country house, Il Palmerino, in Maiano, a short distance from Fiesole and within easy
reach of Florence. This was to be Violet’s home until her death in 1935” (Colby 43).
244
Consequently, this story is about cultural memory as much as it is about ghosts and
hauntings. Just as the text is unconcerned with the belief-disbelief issue, Lee’s narrative (which
frames madwoman’s story within madwoman’s story, apparition within apparition), leaves how
she knows what she knows an enigma. Lee’s own biographical memories of the Risorgimento
period seem to be defined by a similar vague sympathy: “In one thing Vernon Lee was
consistent throughout her life. From her early twenties to her death she was a liberal with
socialist leanings. She carried no family heritage of political beliefs. With their wanderings over
the continent of Europe, the Pagets acquired no political roots other than a vague sympathy for
Italian independence and unification” (Colby 272). Colby cites Lee’s mentors, “Giovanni
Ruffini, a veteran of the Risorgimento, and his companion Cornelia Turner, who still cherished
her girlhood memories of the ardent radical Shelley,” in characterizing her nascent political
interest in the young Italian nation-state (Colby 272–73). Though Lee often considered herself
to be a person who came of age in Italy, and specifically in Florence, she seems to understand
this place with a certain distance. Still, Florentine people claimed her as one of their own, so she
was, in many ways, privy to the intimate public consciousnesses Madame Krasinska’s narrative
ramblings begin to touch. Though it’s impossible to know what Lee remembered about the Italy
of her childhood (she was born in 1856), Colby’s brief treatment of the Risorgimento suggests
the ways Lee was forced to contend with a past she didn’t experience herself.
Likewise, for Madame Krasinska, the hauntings themselves, not their historicity, are
crucial, because they often mark moments when she diverges from a collective knowledge of
Sora Lena to a much more intimate understanding of her consciousness. In fact, Lee’s narrator
reveals the most intimate details of the boys’ lives—and deaths—during moments when she’s
aware of her historic mis-remembering: “Oh, God! oh, God! and they lie in the big trench at
245
San Martino, without even a cross over them, or a bit of wood with their name. But the white
coats of the Austrians were soaked red, I warrant you! And the new dye they call magenta is
made of pipe-clay—the pipeclay the dogs clean their white coats with—and the blood of
Austrians. It’s a grand dye, I tell you!” (Lee, “Legend” 176). Lee’s language here shows how
Madame Krasinska seems to remember 1859 with painful immediacy but also with the nostalgia
of the 1880s and the 1890s. It’s clear she knows what ultimately happens between the Austrians
and the Italians after Unification, even if her mind is ostensibly stuck in the Risorgimento period:
“It’s nonsense about the Italians having been beaten. The Austrians were beaten into bits, made
cats’-meat of; and the volunteers are returning tomorrow. Temistocle and Momino—Momino is
Girolamo, you know—will be back tomorrow [ . . . ]” (176). Madame Krasinska, like Sora Lena,
is wrong, since her sons never return; however, this hopeful incorrectness emphasizes just how
perfectly she has subsumed the other woman’s consciousness, for if she is wrong in fact, she is,
finally, much more fully sensitive in her emotional capacity.
Having come to understand and experience Sora Lena’s pain, Madame Krasinska feels
moved to attempt suicide in the very same room in the very same house where Sora Lena was
found. Just as she can’t tell why she feels drawn to the railway station and the chemist shop, she
can’t quite place why this site feels so familiar, but as soon as she puts the noose around her neck
and climbs onto a chair to hang herself from the rafter, she sees her ghost, face-to-face, for the
first and last time: “The door creaked and opened slowly. The big, hulking woman, with the
vague, red face and bleary stare, and the rabbit-skin muff, bobbing on her huge crinolined skirts,
shambled slowly into the room. It was the Sora Lena” (183). It’s interesting that the line “It was
the Sora Lena” repeats—verbatim—the line Cecchino thinks to himself just after he sees
246
Madame Krasinska in costume, wearing the sketch as a mask.179 This moment, too, marks a
hypnogogic state wherein the two women are inextricably bound to one another. During the
moment of impersonation, however, Madame Krasinska renders “the Sora Lena” a mask, not a
woman. Now, she sees her as a figure more alive than ever. When Sora Lena appears to
Madame Krasinska as a ghost materialized, she’s finally able to imagine the fragility of both of
their lives. It may be that this realization is Madame Krasinska’s saving grace: she faints,
apparently before hanging herself. Lee’s narrative, then, comes full circle. By rewriting the
legend of Sora Lena’s death, Madame Krasinska demonstrates that her historical reclamations
may be at once violent and revivifying.
Like the other inspirited people who populate Lee’s Hauntings, Madame Krasinska is
drawn to an apparition-like person who heightens her artistic temperament to the point of
stultifying—and existential—ambivalence. “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” traces the
ghosts of mid-century aesthetics, politics, and history at the fin de siècle. While I’ve argued that
this text is deeply concerned with such hauntings, I also want to emphasize the subtitle of this
collection: Polite Stories. Lee’s story is predicated on the interstices between what is and isn’t
pointedly articulated, especially when she remembers the moment just between the Risorgimento
and the Unification of Italy: 1859. “Polite” suggests that this story is about narrative or
metanarrative mutedness as much as it’s about the two women’s intersecting afterlives. Lee’s
narrative is preoccupied with what people do and don’t say about Sora Lena, what people do and
don’t say about Madame Krasinska, and these elisions parallel the misgivings Cecchino
expresses about her interest in his sketch at the beginning of the story. In her preface to this
collection, Lee argues that “round these sketches of frivolous women, there have gathered some
179
In fact, we encounter Cecchino again just before Madame Krasinska tries to kill herself: “Yes, Cecchino
certainly recognized her now,” he thinks to himself; “Yes, there was no doubt” (179).
247
of the least frivolous thoughts, heaven knows, that have ever come into my head; or rather, such
thoughts have condensed and taken body in these stories” (5). Indeed, though Madame
Krasinska may be read as an apparition of expatriate decadence, a person who embodies this
movement’s shallow understanding of politics and aesthetics, she also should be read as the
personification of historical self-consciousness.
For if Florentine expatriates are to take an aesthetic or an artistic interest in a place, Lee
suggests, then they must come to understand and appreciate something of the political crises that
gave shape to the souls inhabiting the Italian landscape, not just hundreds of years in the past, but
also, and especially, in the present moment. Ultimately, the texts themselves—the sketchturned-mask and the legends belonging to Sora Lena and to Madame Krasinska alike—are
historiographic mnemonics through which Lee fictionalizes crises of longing, belonging, and
existential terror characterizing the post-Risorgimento period. Lee’s title Vanitas memorializes
not only the dead woman but also the deadening life Madame Krasinska inherits when she
dismisses Sora Lena’s ghosts as a joke; the joke may finally be that this woman tries to
distinguish her past from her ghost’s past. For if we read Madame Krasinska as a still life
embodied, then she is, like the sketch or the mask, defined by a stultifying pain that does and
doesn’t belong to her and that is almost beyond her spiritual capacity.
Yet we know as early as the first page that Madame Krasinska is redeemed through yet
another transformation: in the wake of her failed suicide, she joins the Little Sisters of the Poor
and is known now as “Mother Antoinette Marie” (184). In fact, “The Legend of Madame
Krasinska” is framed by still another first-person narrator, one of Cecchino’s friends, who goes
with him to the convent, where the woman once called “Madame Krasinska” now lives and
works. Cecchino’s visit to the convent takes place long after the plot of the legend proper, and
248
this frame is crucial, because it ensures that we won’t misread Madame Krasinska in the ways
Madame Krasinska misread Sora Lena. Ultimately, Madame Krasinska atones for her fatal
impersonation of Sora Lena by committing her life to God but, perhaps much more importantly,
to the old and the poor. Both the order and the name Madame Krasinska chooses for herself are
revealing. The Little Sisters of the Poor is a mendicant order (like St. Clare’s and St. Theresa’s,
which I discuss in chapter two). Founded in the nineteenth century by St. Jeanne Jugan near
Rennes, France, the order was known by the mid-nineteenth century for helping the elderly,
especially the penniless and the homeless.
When Cecchino’s friend tours the convent with the now “Mother Antoinette Marie,” he
expresses an “admiration for the institution which contrived to feed scores of old paupers on
broken victuals begged from private houses and inns” (152). In turn, she says, “with an
earnestness which was almost passionate, ‘Ah, the old! the old! It is so much, much worse for
them than for any others. Have you ever tried to imagine what it is to be poor and forsaken and
old?’” (152). In this moment, Madame-Krasinska-turned-Mother-Antoinette-Marie shows how
she transcends mere impersonation: she isn’t Sora Lena, or Sora Lena’s ghost, but a woman who
truly empathizes with the present-tense poor and forsaken and old. Lee renders Madame
Krasinska’s spiritual transformation most legible, however, in her newly assumed name. By
claiming an inversion of “Marie Antoinette,” the perhaps-American, perhaps-Polish “Madame
Krasinska” baptizes herself as a person who also reverses the Austro-French Queen’s
callousness. Unlike Marie Antoinette, Mother Antoinette Marie lives to redeem herself. Yet the
word “Mother” may be even more telling than the words “Marie” and “Antoinette,” for it shows
how she has become, in spirit, in name, and finally, in deed, a caretaker for the Florentine
children she never could have had.
249
CHAPTER 5
Venice, 1848–1870
Not Just Mrs. Ruskin or Mrs. Millais: “Effie in Venice” Revisited
Since the woman born Euphemia Chalmers Gray is usually remembered as the wife of
two eminent Victorians, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais, she is rarely considered one in
her own right.180 Still, Effie Ruskin/Millais may be as infamous now as she was in 1848 when
she married her first husband; in 1855 when she married her second; or in 1897 when she died,
mother to eight, grandmother to thirteen, and finally having received the Queen’s favor. Effie
Ruskin/Millais’s story is often pared down to three events that took place between 1848 and
1855: her first marriage, her annulment, and her second marriage. Yet she lived for forty-two
years after this tumultuous period. Despite the fact that she raised a family in Perth and then in
London, and travelled with her husband and children to Paris, to Chamonix, and to Venice, she is
often remembered solely for her romantic scandals. Indeed, she usually appears as a marginal or
as a relational figure to John Ruskin or to John Everett Millais, or even to what Jan Marsh has
termed the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. Ruskin and Millais biographers often disparage Effie,
180
Surprisingly, this assumption about Effie Ruskin/Millais even pervades scholarship that emphasizes her story
over John Ruskin’s or John Everett Millais’s. For as Merryn Williams acknowledges in the final chapter of Effie: A
Victorian Scandal, from Ruskin’s Wife to Millais’s Muse: “Effie was an ordinary woman—a very intelligent
woman, but one who would probably not be remembered if she had not married two extraordinary men. But such
men always have a very wide choice of wives, so we should not assume she was commonplace. Only a few
Victorian women were celebrated for their own achievements; a much greater number ‘lived faithfully a hidden life,
and rest in unvisited tombs’” (185–186). Williams’s allusion to George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) may be
useful for rendering Effie Ruskin/Millais a legible figure for this period; such comparisons recur as a trope
throughout the biography: Effie appears Dorothea-like, Rosamond-like, and even St-Theresa-like. While the trope
suggests that Effie Ruskin/Millais was as complicated as one of Eliot’s heroines (or anti-heroines), it also suggests
her “hidden life” was a fiction. Given Effie Ruskin/Millais’s cultural afterlife, Williams’s comparisons may be as
damning as they are useful. I return to this critical tendency—reading Effie Ruskin/Millais as an Eliot character—at
the end of this chapter.
250
suggesting that she ruined her husbands’ reputations, and even that she pitted them against one
another. Even feminist biographers, including Marsh, who have worked to recuperate the
women made famous by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, find her to be an anomaly. Like the
other women who modelled for Pre-Raphaelite paintings, she wasn’t a virgin and she wasn’t a
whore, but she also wasn’t Lizzie Siddal. Likewise, she wasn’t just an angel in the house for
John Ruskin or for John Everett Millais, and yet we still shy away from her because she isn’t the
iconoclast we may want her to be. Though she is ever-present in studies of the period, she often
appears as an awkward footnote; in fact, until recently, Effie Ruskin/Millais seems to have
baffled biographers, even feminist biographers.181 The notoriety she has garnered may be
responsible for her perennial, if damning, cameos in profiles of the period (newspaper articles,
novels, plays, operas, films) where she often appears as a one-dimensional cultural icon.182
Yet her continued infamy within these mid-century politicoaesthetic circles shouldn’t be
understood in marginal or in relational terms alone, for when she is represented marginally or
181
Until the last decade, only two people had written books devoted to Effie Ruskin/Milliais: her grandson Admiral
Sir William James and Mary Lutyens. Many have surmised that James’s The Order of Release: John Ruskin and
Effie Gray (1947) was published on the occasion of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s centennial, for as Chloe
Johnson argues, it may be read as a revisionist history of Effie Ruskin/Millais as much as it is of John Ruskin or of
John Everett Millais. For the last forty years, Mary Lutyens’s three-part biography— Young Mrs. Ruskin in Venice
(1965), subsequently published with the title Effie in Venice: Effie Ruskin's Letters Home 1849–1852; Millais and
the Ruskins (1967); and The Ruskins and the Grays (1972)—has been the authoritative source for letters that
remained unpublished in James’s study. Two biographies of Effie Ruskin/Millais were published in 2010:
Williams’s Effie: A Victorian Scandal, from Ruskin’s Wife to Millais’s Muse and Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s Effie:
the Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin, and John Everett Millais. Helen Barolini’s “Effie in Venice and
the Roman Spring of Margaret Fuller” (2002) isn’t a biography, but it is the most sustained meditation on Effie
Ruskin/Millais beyond the other books catalogued here.
182
For examples of the private gossip, novels, plays, operas, films, and newspaper articles written about Effie
Ruskin between 1855 and 2011, see Elizabeth Gaskell’s letter to John Forster (17 May 1854); The Love of John
Ruskin (1912); The Order of Release: John Ruskin and Effie Gray (1947); Young Mrs. Ruskin in Venice,
subsequently published as Effie in Venice: Effie Ruskin's Letters Home 1849–1852 (1965); Millais and the Ruskins
(1967); and The Ruskins and the Grays (1972); The Love School (in Great Britain) or The Brotherhood (in the
United States) (1975); Parrots and Owls (1994); The Passion of John Ruskin (1994); Modern Painters (1995); The
Countess (1995); The Secret Trials of Effie Ruskin (1997); The Order of Release (1998); Mrs Ruskin (2003);
Desperate Romantics (2009); Effie (forthcoming); and Untouched (forthcoming).
251
relationally, portraits of Effie Ruskin aren’t flattering.183 Next to speculations about reasons for
her virginity, the most pervasive biographical assumptions address the honeymoon she was
supposed to have had in Venice. Effie and John Ruskin had planned to travel to Venice
immediately after their wedding in 1848; however, as the mythology surrounding their marriage
often reminds us, their honeymoon was delayed because of the 1848 revolutions across the
European Continent. In lieu of a trip to John Ruskin’s beloved city, the couple travelled to Blair
Atholl, Scotland in April 1848; to Salisbury, England in July 1848; to Boulogne, Abbeville,
Rouen, Falaise, Lisieux, and Paris, France in August 1848. Soon thereafter, John and Effie
Ruskin travelled to Venice twice before annulling their marriage: the first time from October
1849 to March 1850, and the second time from September 1851 to June 1852.
The couple’s first trip to Venice may be the most famous, since John Ruskin completed
research for the second and the third volumes of The Stones of Venice (1851–1853) during this
period. Effie Ruskin’s Venetian experiences were, however, equally significant, despite the fact
183
In the rest of the chapter, I refer to her as Effie Ruskin, not as Effie Millais, since this was her married name
during the period this chapter considers. Our awkwardness about what to call her when shows how the buzz over
her first marriage, her annulment, and her second marriage spills over into the very lexicon of contemporary
discussions: to acknowledge the marriage or not to acknowledge the marriage by calling her Effie Ruskin? or to
overcompensate by calling her Effie Gray or Effie Millais, even when discussing the period when she was married
to Ruskin? Most people opt for “Effie” alone, a telling choice, since John Ruskin gave her this name; she’d been
called “Phemy” at home and at school before. In fact, writers/screenwriters have dramatized the surname debacle in
their titles for various biopics, docudramas, and books: she is referenced elliptically through John Ruskin’s books
(Modern Painters), through John Everett Millais’s paintings (The Order of Release), or even as a coy direct object
(The Love of John Ruskin or The Passion of John Ruskin). Otherwise, she appears simply as Effie, the shortened
version of the Christian name, Euphemia. Both Williams’s and Cooper’s biographies use the single word “Effie” in
boldface on their covers: Williams’s book is called Effie: A Victorian Scandal, from Ruskin’s Wife to Millais’s
Muse, and Cooper’s is called Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John Everett Millais (in
the United States) and The Model Wife: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais (in Great Britain).
All three titles suggest the manner in which Effie’s identity is defined in terms of her marriage to one man and then
to the other, so that she appears as “a wife” and as “a muse,” perhaps to both. Likewise, Suzanne Fagence Cooper
has dubbed her The Model Wife, a moniker that coyly enfolds her identity as a face in Millais’s paintings and her
identity as the icon of marriage, and of rejected marriage, among mid-nineteenth-century gossip mills (Lady
Elizabeth Eastlake and Elizabeth Gaskell are Effie’s most famous informants in London’s tittle-tattle circles).
Williams’s biography divides Effie’s life into four sections, indicated by her name changes: “Effie Gray,” “Effie
Ruskin,” “Effie Gray Falsely Called Ruskin,” and “Effie Millais.” Cooper’s title follows suit in many ways, since it
indexes Effie’s various “lives” through the three names she held from childhood to adulthood; surely, the “lives”
following “Effie” don’t refer to John Ruskin and to John Everett Millais? Yet the oft-reproduced—and most
telling—misnomer may be the typo of “Euphemia” associated with The Love of John Ruskin: she appears as
“Ephemera” on every single website associated with the short film.
252
that most people dismiss her as a cosmopolite, a socialite, and a flirt. When critics remember
that Effie Ruskin accompanied John to Venice in 1849–1850 and in 1851–1852, they often
catalogue the foreign men whom she admired: during the first trip, Field Marshall Wimpffen
and First Lieutenant Charles Paulizza; during the second trip, General Joseph Radetzky and
Emperor Franz Joseph I. Yet beyond the glamorous balls she describes in her letters to her
mother, father, and brother George (especially during the second trip), Effie Ruskin’s
correspondence reveals a nuanced understanding of present-tense Austro-Venetian relations
(especially during the first trip) often ignored by John Ruskin’s critics. The first trip may be
useful for contextualizing John Ruskin’s Gothicism, but it is also crucial to our understanding of
Effie Ruskin’s present-tense impressions of mid-nineteenth-century Venice: her correspondence
shows how attuned she was to what she saw in the wake of the 1848 revolution and the 1849
bombardment. Far from the reputation she has earned as well-to-do—and as detached—her
private letters document a sensitivity to the immediate moment often missing in John Ruskin’s
public tomes. Effie Ruskin’s records of post-1848 Venice, as much as John Ruskin’s Gothic
travelogue, render the couple’s first trip pivotal for historians and literary historians alike.
Effie Ruskin hasn’t been taken as seriously as John for obvious reasons: her annulment
destroyed her credibility, her letters remain overshadowed by his, and her politicoaesthetic
temperament reveals that her allegiances shifted between Italians and Austrians much more
immediately, and much more often, than his during this period.184 Consequently, her Venetian
184
It’s difficult to tell exactly when John Ruskin shifted from mostly anti-republican to mostly republican
allegiances, in part because his biographers rely on his letters to his father, who was a staunch conservative. Like
many Britons, John James Ruskin didn’t support the revolutions of 1848; and John Ruskin’s slow shift from antirepublicanism to republicanism follows the trajectory of the popular press in Great Britain. Most people believe
both John and John James Ruskin opposed the Risorgimento and the Unification for reasons that had little to do with
Italy. It’s clear that John Ruskin softened his anti-republican perspectives between 1849 and 1859, when the United
Provinces of Central Italy was realized; by 1864, when John James Ruskin died, he was much more sympathetic to
republican ideologies (see especially Edward Alexander and Tim Hilton). Several Ruskin biographers emphasize
the fact that this anti-republicanism wasn’t an anti-Italian sentiment as much as it was an aesthetic or artistic fear:
253
letters haven’t been read as serious political documents. Indeed, when her letters were finally
republished in the 1960s (in Lutyens’ three-book biography), many nineteenth-century critics
were quick to say that she was apolitical. Yet it’s important to remember that she was writing
letters home to her mother and her father, and if her perspective seems apolitical, at least at first
glance, then it may be because this was the expected posture of a Victorian woman, especially a
newlywed Victorian woman. Strangely, this fact seems to have eluded even the most forgiving
aficionados of mid-nineteenth-century literature.
For while Lutyens’s Effie in Venice was immediately popular when it was published in
1965, and while it has been reprinted, again and again, over the last forty-seven years, Effie
Ruskin’s correspondence wasn’t interpreted in light of second-wave feminism. Instead, she has
emerged as the quintessential carefree travel companion for her twenty-first-century readers.
Indeed, as late as 2002, Barolini writes, “Effie was good beach company—gossipy, witty,
effortlessly name dropping for the folks back home, full of perceptive observations on the
society life around her, a lively foil to the somber, serious, and quite solitary John” (637).
Tristram Hunt, who is, admittedly, much more interested in John Ruskin than in Effie, dismisses
her as “long-suffering” (116). Effie Ruskin’s Venetian reputation relies heavily on the elder
Ruskins’ and Grays’ letters, and on John Ruskin’s Praeterita (1885–1889), which pit his austere
work ethic against her idleness, or seeming idleness, and her allegedly expensive taste.
Consequently, the rumors circulating between the Ruskin and the Gray families as early as
1848—that Effie and John Ruskin were unhappy in Venice, just as they were in London—affect
John Ruskin worried Italian cities would be destroyed by the revolutions and the bombardments sweeping the
European Continent during this period. Moreover, John Ruskin’s correspondence from 1846 to 1852 shows how he
wasn’t an Austrian sympathizer. Alexander argues that this revolutionary period was defined by Ruskin’s serious
soul-searching, for he realized art may be a solipsistic endeavor, especially during wartime. While John Ruskin
didn’t support the Italians or the Austrians, then, his political allegiances were still governed mainly by his worries
about the integrity of Gothic bridges and buildings. Once he abandoned the theories of art and art history that first
made him famous, his political conscience followed a similar shift. For a reading of John Ruskin’s politicoaesthetic
temperament between 1846 and 1852, see especially David Barnes.
254
the way we read or misread her letters. It’s often suggested that they led parallel lives in
isolation from one another. John spent most of his time drawing bridges and buildings with his
amanuensis George Hobbs. In the meantime, according to the Ruskins, whose letters to the
Grays are filled with prying speculations about their daughter, Effie secured her reputation as the
frivolous wife.185
Effie Ruskin did spend most of her time sightseeing with her friend Charlotte Ker, and
though she’d tried to help John by keeping him company during their 1848 Normandy trip and
by reading histories of Venice while he was abroad from 1848 to 1849 (during the first year of
their marriage), she didn’t accompany him for his in situ research.186 When biographers—both
John’s and Effie’s—discuss the couple’s first trip to Venice, then, they often note that this
disparity was a source of concern for the elder Ruskins and Grays, even if John and Effie
preferred to spend time alone or with Hobbs and Ker, respectively. At the same time,
biographers often argue that this trip was Effie Ruskin’s olive branch to John. That she
185
For studies that address Effie Ruskin’s identity as a frivolous wife, see Shirley Guiton, Phyllis Rose, Christopher
Hibbert, Gay Daly, Lutyens, J. B. Bullen, John Batchelor, Tim Hilton, Margaret Plant, Franny Moyle, Hunt,
Williams, and Cooper. To be sure, Effie Ruskin’s biographers discuss her frivolity as often as John’s. Even her
most forgiving readers concede that this character trait was not surprising given John Ruskin’s frequent absence.
Rose, in fact, argues that Effie Ruskin must have felt “mortified” by her husband’s neglect in London and in Venice,
and that her interest in Austrian soldiers was to be expected (76). For if anyone was to be censured for impropriety,
Rose argues, then it was John Ruskin, who refused to accompany his wife in public. Rose may be right; however,
by blaming John Ruskin for Effie’s shortcomings, she merely villainizes him: “Perhaps she was frivolous. She
never pretended to be anything more than a well-bred young lady, and such young ladies were frivolous by vocation,
by education, by social definition. What would have convinced Ruskin of her seriousness? Later, he would say she
was crazy. One deplores the flinging about of such judgmental terms. Still, it must be said that if either of them was
crazy, he was” (75).
186
Effie Ruskin did serve as John’s research companion during the 1848 trip to Normandy but didn’t during the
1849–1850 or the 1851–1852 trips to Venice. It’s unclear whether John Ruskin wanted Effie’s help. Jennifer Lloyd
acknowledges that his expectations for her (sketching; learning French, German, and Italian) were not unusual,
given her education and given the Grays’ and the Ruskins’ socioeconomic status. Yet, as early as their courtship, he
claimed he wanted them to spend time apart from one another. “In his courtship letters,” Lloyd writes, “John
depicted Effie learning to draw architectural features as well as he could, and warned her, ‘I must go on with my
profession and—while for a certain time of the day—I shall always be entirely yours—to go and be with you where
you choose—yet for another part of the day, and that—usually the largest—you will have to be mine—or sit at
home,’ erasing the division of home and his professional work” (91). John Ruskin’s early letters to Effie also
upbraided her to write “legibly, although he knew that in penmanship, at least, she fell far short of perfection” (91).
Ultimately, as Lloyd argues, “she proved temperamentally unsuited” to valuing his pursuits over her own (91). Still
other critics, including Guiton, Hibbert, and Cooper, understand Effie Ruskin’s refusal to serve as his amanuensis as
a testament to her character and to their respect for one another.
255
suggested (upon his return from the Alps in September 1849) they travel together intimates her
desire to identify with him and with his favorite places: Chamonix and Venice.187 Still, the
question of whether John and Effie really found peace together in Venice is often overlooked
altogether. It’s telling that Effie Ruskin has been remembered—in passing—both as the flirt and
as the peace-desiring wife: this incongruity seems to have damned her to illegibility in our
cultural memory of the period.
While The Stones of Venice rendered John Ruskin an art historical demigod and Effie his
lesser, and much more frivolous travel companion, Praeterita relegated her to near oblivion:
John Ruskin never mentions Effie by name in his famous memoir, and he dismisses the 1850s, in
full, as a “wasted” decade, despite the fact that this period saw the publication of foundational
work: The Stones of Venice (volumes I, II, and III in 1851, 1853, and 1853, respectively);
Modern Painters (volumes III and IV, both in 1856); and The Elements of Drawing (1857). In
fact, some of John Ruskin’s critics go as far as dismissing the importance of Effie Ruskin’s
presence during the 1849–1850 trip—and deleting her altogether from the 1851–1852 trip.
Though the Ruskins didn’t annul the marriage until 1854, both Bullen and Hunt suggest that he
replaced her with his monumental travelogue. “Effie Gray was soon removed from her place in
Ruskin’s life,” Bullen writes, “and as he finished with her so he finished The Stones of Venice.
What he had hoped might be an ideal Paradise had become dust and ashes, and Venice, like Effie
herself, had become for him, in Byron’s words, the ‘Paradise of our despair’” (20). Likewise,
187
People in London and in Perth began speculating that the Ruskin marriage was in trouble as early as May 1849,
when John travelled to France and to Switzerland with his parents; Effie stayed at Bowerswell with her mother,
father, and ailing siblings. Just as critics argue about whether Effie Ruskin’s naïveté was or wasn’t sincere, they
also read her interest in travelling with John suspiciously: some read it sympathetically, some unsympathetically.
“Effie was intelligent and resourceful,” Batchelor writes, “and no doubt she was doing her best to strengthen the
marriage by learning as much about her husband’s interests as she could” (86). Yet Batchelor’s reading may be
much more sinister, for he reminds us that “she was much fêted” abroad because of her beauty and, in Venice, she
garnered attention John denied her (86). Still other critics suggest that this calculated sojourn to Venice exemplifies
Effie Ruskin’s “perspicacity” (Moyle 64). For fuller discussions of Effie Ruskin’s calculating efforts to revive her
relationship with her husband in Venice, see also Lutyens, Daly, John Julius Norwich, Hunt, Williams, and Cooper.
256
Hunt reads the success of the marriage and the travelogue as conflicting alternatives for John
Ruskin during this period: “Sadly, the trip did not bring husband and wife any closer, but it did
result in one of the architectural epics of the English language” (118). Notably, John Ruskin was
still married to Effie when he published the third volume of The Stones of Venice. Perhaps
Bullen and Hunt take their cues from Praeterita, which effectively replaces Effie Ruskin with a
catalogue of work he completed during the period. “The events of the ten years 1850–1860,”
Ruskin writes, “for the most part wasted in useless work, must be arranged first in their main
order, before I can give clear account of anything that happened in them. But this breaking down
of my Puritan faith, being the matter probably most important to many readers of my later books,
shall be traced in this chapter to the sorrowful end” (Praeterita 430). John Ruskin’s account has
been read as an oblique criticism of Effie as much as it is of his own work, especially because of
her absence in the rest of the memoir.188 Yet Effie Ruskin’s Venetian letters to her mother,
188
John Ruskin doesn’t mention Effie Ruskin/Millais by name anywhere in Praeterita, though he does mention her,
in passing, as a girl for whom he’d once written a poem; he never alludes to their marriage. Though Ruskin doesn’t
discuss their marriage or their annulment, his descriptions of trips to Chamonix and to Venice suggest that this
period was crucial to the ideas he developed in his most famous art historical texts, including The Stones of Venice.
Still, despite his vivid recollections of Chamonix and of Venice, he claims that his memory of the 1850s is hazy.
Ruskin’s descriptions of Chamonix, especially, are blurred and self-referential, and they suggest his memories of
this place are superimposed upon one another. For instance, John Ruskin remembers his 1849 trip to Chamonix,
which he took right before his 1849–1850 Venetian sojourn with Effie both in his Diaries and in Praeterita. In a
diary entry dated 10 July 1849, just two months before he travelled with Effie from Perth to Venice, he wrote: “Nor
have I yet seen a more noble and burning sunset than was on the Charmoz and lower Verte to-night—a hot, almost
sanguine, but solemn, crimson. But I can write no more to-night. I have pleasant letters too, and much to thank G-d
for, now and ever. May it please him to permit me to be here again with my Father and Mother; and Wife” (407–
408). Like the diary entry, the autobiography he wrote in hindsight suggests that this visit marked a turning point in
his geological studies. Effie Ruskin is, crucially, a shadow figure during this period: the 1848–1849 Continental
Tour John Ruskin took with his parents was supposed to have been his honeymoon with Effie. Subsequent
descriptions of Chamonix in Praeterita often blur his various travels through this place across the 1840s and the
1850s, suggesting that he continued to be haunted by his non-honeymoon trip to Chamonix. Indeed, he hearkens
back to the days and the weeks he spent alone there in 1849, reminding his readers that his mother and father were
nearby and that his isolation was deliberate. Subsequent (and much more public) references to his July 1849 trip to
Chamonix seem to be echoes of the diary entry quoted above, though they are missing his prayerful closing line
about his father, his mother, and (almost as an afterthought) his wife. For Effie Ruskin’s parallel descriptions of her
October 1849 trip to Chamonix, see her letters from 14 to 21 October 1849 (Ruskin, Effie in Venice 46–50). For
fuller discussion of John Ruskin’s autobiographical “gaps” in Praeterita, especially those relating to his marriage
and his annulment, see John Rosenberg, who argues that Effie Ruskin, “insofar as she ever mattered to Ruskin,
mattered only as the pretty young girl whom he courted and not as his wife” (217).
257
father, and brother reveal that she wasn’t as unthinking, unfeeling, or self-absorbed as the
Ruskins and their biographers intimate.
Effie Ruskin’s two sojourns in Venice have never been taken seriously as
politicoaesthetic awakenings, for, as her cultural afterlife reveals, she has never been taken
seriously as a thinking or a feeling person beyond her 1854–1855 marital crisis. Yet far from
being the apathetic traveller depicted in the letters circulating between the Ruskins and the
Grays, she was deeply affected by the people she met in Venice. While John was drafting his
famous treatise on Gothic architecture, Effie Ruskin was absorbed with her present-tense
surroundings: the Austrians and the Italians she encountered with Ker during their day-to-day
excursions. Both Williams’s and Cooper’s recent biographies catalogue Effie Ruskin’s vexed
interests in Venetian “misery.” That they read her descriptions of Austrian and Italian people
differently from one another suggests Effie-in-Venice is much more nuanced than her reputation
might otherwise imply. For instance, Williams writes that Effie Ruskin was “conscious” of the
“‘misery and wickedness’ in the city,” since her “family had always been involved with charities
in Perth, and she was eager to help where she could” (42). Yet Cooper argues that “she barely
acknowledged the misery around her, even when she stumbled across it on her way to a party”
(61). Interestingly, Williams and Cooper cite exactly the same anecdotes from exactly the same
letters: a story about an old woman selling lace, a story about an old man trying to void his son’s
conscription in the wake of the bombardment, and, perhaps most dramatically, her daytrip with
First Lieutenant Charles Paulizza to San Giuliano, where she saw the remains of the air balloon
siege (Williams 42; Cooper 61). The Williams-Cooper disagreement raises some important
questions: was Effie Ruskin impassive to the homeless Venetian people she saw each night
258
while walking from one palace or another to the Hotel Danieli? did she sympathize with
Italians? with Austrians? both? how was and wasn’t this her Grand Tour?
I contend with these same letters, and I argue that this ambivalence in Effie Ruskin’s
biographical afterlife (which we can trace mostly clearly in Williams’s and Cooper’s equally fair,
if divergent, readings) in fact extends the politicoaesthetic ambivalence that characterizes her
1849–1850 correspondence. While Effie Ruskin’s Venetian letters have become important
documents for her biographers and for his, in part because they are fodder for our critical
voyeurism, they are also important for historians and literary historians, since they are rare
documents of expatriate life in the wake of the 1848 revolution and the 1849 bombardment. The
purpose of this chapter isn’t, then, to recuperate Effie Ruskin’s identity as the wife of one of two
eminent Victorians. For while this is the most infamous period of her life, and while these are
the most famous letters she wrote, we shouldn’t just read them as clues to her marital happiness
or unhappiness. Instead, we should study them as records of what she saw during a tumultuous
historical moment. In the rest of the chapter, I read Effie Ruskin’s ambivalent allegiances to
Italians and to Austrians as a meaningful politicoaesthetic temperament in order to demonstrate
the ways her political life was just as nuanced as her personal life.
John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers commonly frame their wedding, their honeymoon,
and their annulment within panoramic descriptions of the Spring of Nations, suggesting that their
personal and political narratives may be read as inseparable from one another.189 Loose
189
For examples of scholarship that reads the honeymoon through the revolution, see Lutyens, Rose, Guiton,
Alexander, Hibbert, Daly, Barolini, Norwich, Hunt, Hilton, Williams, and Cooper. “The earlier part of their
marriage was overshadowed by political uncertainties,” Hilton writes, and supports his argument by cataloging what
was happening in London, Paris, Venice, as well as (broadly) Hungary on 10 April 1848. For similar catalogues,
see especially Williams and Barolini. In fact, 10 April appears as a watershed moment for John and Effie Ruskin—
as well as the rest of the world—in Hilton’s biography, although it’s unclear whether Hilton emphasizes it because
of its personal or political significance—or if they become interchangeable. Having described the wedding day in
these panoramic terms, Hilton emphasizes the stalled honeymoon as a defining moment for John Ruskin, though his
disappointment has little to do with Effie: “All this was greatly disturbing to the Ruskins. It was republicanism,
259
associations between their wedding and the revolution are often predicated on their honeymoon,
which was thwarted because of unrest abroad. Existing discussions of Effie Ruskin’s 1849–1852
letters often emphasize details that make her 1854 annulment seem inevitable, a fact that cannot
be ignored. For despite the fact that Effie Ruskin’s reputation has been oversimplified (because
she is read through her first and her second marriages and through her annulment), these personal
crises do affect the way we’ve come to understand her political identity in meaningful ways. In
fact, the wedding and the honeymoon have become grand narratives, just as the 1848 revolutions
have, both because these private moments were scandalous and because the private and the
public crises that ensued seem, in most critical retrospectives, to have prophesized one another.
These critical elisions between private and public discourses often—ironically—make hasty
distinctions between Effie Ruskin’s “personal” and “political” dispositions. For instance, Tim
Hilton, one of John Ruskin’s leading biographers, suggests that he had a much more objective
political mind than she: “Effie’s politics, on the other hand, tended towards the personal. She
found that British foreign policy had an effect on her position in Austrian society” (160). By
oversimplifying Effie Ruskin’s identity as a cosmopolite or a socialite, he trivializes her personal
experiences abroad, which were, in fact, political; and he also trivializes her intellect. For as
Cooper attests, the “paradoxical relationship” Effie Ruskin had “with Venice was personal as
well as political” (61).
therefore evil. […] Ruskin feared that it might be ten years before they could travel freely in Europe again” (122).
Indeed, as Williams argues, the honeymoon was “overshadowed” by uprisings, just as the wedding was: “Then
there was the postponed continental holiday. The Ruskins were vehemently opposed to the revolutions which were
shaking Europe at the time John and Effie got married, and annoyed by the ruin of their plans” (31). Alexander also
suggests the honeymoon and the revolution came to inform one another in John Ruskin’s mind: “Ruskin was very
quickly to recognized that far more than his honeymoon was imperiled by the revolutions. [. . .] The revolutions,
once they penetrated his consciousness, nearly overwhelmed him, for they threatened not merely the destruction of
the old order but of European civilization itself and of his sacred occupation along with it. The work whose
seriousness he had so recently proclaimed had now been rendered precarious and even frivolous in his eyes” (25).
260
Helena Michie addresses this tendency to elide personal and political histories in her
introduction to Victorian Honeymoons, where she argues that this critical tendency to conflate
the wedding, the honeymoon, and the revolutions—and, by extension, “private” and “public
discourses of history”—is disturbing (xiv). Michie writes that “the Ruskin marriage seems to
inspire a particularly efficient form of the movement from private to public events” (16). For
Michie, this “movement” is problematic, because it reduces Effie Ruskin to a historicized sex
scandal. The private-public elisions that connect the revolutions to the wedding day and
wedding night don’t originate with Victorians but, as Michie argues, with “the persistent interest
of Victorianists in the hows, whys, and wherefores of (for example) John Ruskin’s behavior” on
10 April 1848 (xiv). Her discussion of the Ruskin marriage close reads scholarship about their
wedding and their honeymoon more than it close reads the letters written by John and Effie
themselves. She parses the manner in which “scholars have used history in their accounts of the
Ruskin marriage, moving seamlessly from the privacy of the Ruskin bedroom to topical
references where the revolutions of 1848 provide a structure of meaning for the marriage and its
failures” (16). Michie identifies a metanarrative pattern among John and Effie Ruskin’s
biographers: they mention the wedding day, they discuss the Spring of Nations as shorthand for
the wedding night, they rarely discuss the marriage, and, ultimately, they imply that the
annulment can be understood in narrative hindsight. For just as the Chartist demonstration failed
on 10 April and the revolutions in France and Italy failed by the end of the summer, the Ruskin
marriage also ended soon thereafter.190 Indeed, discussions that pair the wedding with the
190
For the most striking examples of scholarship that elides the private and the public of 10 April 1848, see Rose,
Hilton, Barolini, Hunt, Williams; Cooper is a notable exception. “The day was, for different reasons,” Rose writes,
“a significant one—as famous in English history as July 4 is to Americans—” (53). Yet this historicizing panorama
extends from the day to the year in its entirety: “for April 10 in that revolutionary year of 1848, when monarchies
disappeared all over Europe, was the day of the Chartist demonstration, the day that revolution did not take place in
England” (53). Rose’s associations between the wedding and the revolutions, or stunted revolutions, is the most
overt: “I began by describing a revolution that did not take place and will now suggest that the sexual failure of the
261
revolutions (or stunted revolutions) mythologize ideas about the marriage—and about how the
revolutions affected John and Effie Ruskin—that are wrong. To follow the logic of the conceit
Michie traces suggests that this marriage was, for John and for Effie Ruskin, a failure right from
the start. Michie’s prescient argument shows how we necessarily undermine Cooper’s important
point—that Effie Ruskin’s personal life was political—when we conflate “private” and “public
discourses of history” (xiv).
Yet as difficult as it is to transcend retellings of the wedding, the honeymoon, and the
annulment, reevaluation of our own biocritical conceits for John and Effie Ruskin is crucial to
understanding why her Venetian correspondence hasn’t been read seriously alongside other
fictional or nonfictional texts written during the Risorgimento period. Just as many of John and
Effie Ruskin’s biographers dismiss her as a cosmopolite, a socialite, or a flirt, they also
characterize her as apolitical, or political only insofar as she parroted what her husband believed.
Though some biographers admit that this isn’t the case—the two didn’t always see eye-to-eye
about important issues, ranging from their politics and their aesthetics to how important it was to
speak German with the Austrians and the Italians they encountered in Venice—none have
Ruskins’ marriage can be seen as another case of the revolution manqué, in that the young Ruskins were, like every
newly wed Victorian couple, in the position of having to rebel against all their previous training. Suddenly, sex,
after years of being proscribed, was approved, encouraged, indeed required. What resulted was sometimes
impotence and frigidity, with the attendant train of misunderstandings and hurt feelings, or, less drastically, sex that
was not very pleasurable. The Ruskins’ plight was probably less extraordinary and eccentric than one might think at
first” (63–64). In Victorian Honeymoons Helena Michie argues, like Rose, that the Ruskin wedding night wasn’t as
unusual as we might think; however, unlike Rose, she cautions against reading the 10 April failures to consummate
a marriage and to overthrow the government through one another. In the days and months immediately following
the wedding, many suspected that this uprising was the reason John’s mother and father didn’t attend the ceremony;
however, the real reason is two-fold: first, the elder Ruskins still had reservations about the match; second, Mrs.
Ruskin found Mr. Ruskin’s father dead (he had committed suicide) in the very room of the very house where Effie
Gray was born and where her mother and father still lived, and she didn’t want to return to Bowerswell. Still other
biographers have noted William Michael Rossetti’s and John Everett Millais’s absences; both were in London the
morning of the 10 April uprising, but John Ruskin hadn’t invited them. Ultimately, the 10 April uprising had
nothing to do with who did, or didn’t, attend the ceremony. For more on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s
involvement in the Chartist demonstration, and the gossip surrounding Rosetti’s and Hunt’s absences, see especially
Williams.
262
devoted serious attention to the ambivalent understanding of Effie Ruskin that the WilliamsCooper synopses and the Michie metanarrative demonstrate.191
This conceit (wedding/honeymoon as revolution) is problematic on its own, but it is even
more problematic when we realize that the critics who sustain it also dismiss Effie Ruskin’s
firsthand accounts of the revolutions that now frame her wedding and her honeymoon. In fact,
few of John Ruskin’s critics consider his reactions to Risorgimento Venice, short of reminding
us that he was, like his mother and father, a staunch conservative; likewise, few of Effie Ruskin’s
(except Williams, Cooper, and Barolini) discuss her letters as post-Risorgimento letters. When
they do, they argue that she was unabashedly sensitive (Williams) or unabashedly insensitive
(Cooper) to the post-blockade poverty she saw, or that she was self-consciously oblivious
(Barolini).192
When read against one another, Williams’s, Cooper’s, and Barolini’s analyses highlight
Effie Ruskin’s ambivalence—was (or wasn’t) Effie Ruskin “short-sighted”? was (or wasn’t) she
impassive to the post-blockade poverty her letters describe?—as a defining characteristic of the
letters themselves. Effie Ruskin’s ambivalence hasn’t been considered seriously, perhaps
because discourses surrounding her letters are often confusing on their own: the letters she wrote
191
In fact, Effie Ruskin mentioned to her mother and father that her ability to speak German was very useful in
Venice, even though the Austrian soldiers spoke a different dialect than the one she learned. John Ruskin couldn’t
speak German, and relied on Effie to help him communicate with people on a day-to-day basis. He also encouraged
her to read more in German and in French, and the elder Ruskins paid for her to take Italian lessons with Charlotte.
Few people spoke English when she arrived in 1849, since Anglo-American tourists were just beginning to return to
the city.
192
Still other critics mention the timing of their delayed honeymoon in passing. For instance, Guiton writes that
John and Effie Ruskin “were in Venice in 1849 and again in 1852”; however while she recognizes the couple saw
Venice in the wake of 1848, her emphasis is their shared indifference: “nothing indicates their consciousness that
they were living among a people who had so deeply resented their loss of independence that they had seized the city
and expelled the oppressor and fought a desperate months’ long siege before the new republic had been defeated”
(63). Barolini, too, reminds us that John and Effie Ruskin’s honeymoon had been stalled because of the revolutions
in Rome, in Venice, and on the rest of the Continent. Yet, Barolini contends, despite the personal disappointments
and hardships these political events may have caused, “Effie in Venice emerges from her letters as the most shortsighted and unconcerned of reactionaries” (644). Barolini writes that Effie Ruskin’s letters are “wrapped in splendid
Brittanic superiority (reminiscent of the Brits in India), she views critically the Italians about her in that period
following their unsuccessful attempt to free themselves from Austrian dominion” (637).
263
are often read as extensions of John’s (and her political beliefs are, then, read as extensions of
his), and our readings of her character are affected by a conceit that frames her personal life in
terms of Risorgimento-era volatility. In other words, part of the reason Effie Ruskin’s criticism
isn’t unequivocal, even if it is oversimplified, is that she is equivocal throughout her Venetian
letters. Effie Ruskin’s letters are rare records of Anglo-American travel in the period
immediately following the 1849 blockade: they reveal that she was as troubled as John Ruskin
by Austro-Venetian conflict, and they demonstrate a much more nuanced, if ambivalent, interest
in the ramifications of the revolution and the bombardment for Venetian people. Effie Ruskin’s
correspondence shows how she was deeply affected by the war-torn, short-lived second
republic—so much so that references to soldiers, unexploded shells, damaged buildings and
bridges, and still populated Austrian base-camps punctuate her day-to-day descriptions.
Effie Ruskin’s ambivalence is a defining characteristic of the letters she wrote to her
family between 1849 and 1850. While I will dwell mostly on the letters she wrote during this
period, her ambivalence appears even more striking when we compare one she wrote during her
first trip to one from her second. In a letter to her father dated 28 October 1849, she writes,
Charlotte and I have a very nice open carriage, and with a valet-de-place on the
box we drive out every forenoon and I assure you strike far more terror into the
hearts of the Austrian Officers & Soldiers than Radetzky himself for such a thing
as two ladies has not been seen here for months, and with the exception of young
Lady Otway who is in the house here, Charlotte and I reign supreme and many are
the cigars that are taken out of the mouths as we pass and innumerable are the
prancing of the horses trotting and galloping after us on the Corso, but they are all
264
Austrians or Croats and I am a thorough Italian here & hate oppression, therefore
I wish them far enough. (Effie in Venice 53–54)
John and Effie Ruskin left Milan for Venice during the last week of October, just two months
after the Venetians surrendered to the Austrian soldiers and officers who had besieged the city
between April and August 1849. The final line in her letter to her father, “I am a thorough
Italian here & hate oppression,” is striking, but perhaps not as surprising as many of John
Ruskin’s critics suggest, especially given the fact that this description anticipates her imminent
journey from Milan to Venice.
John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers alike have suggested that this letter is an anomaly,
and they chide her newfound “Italian” allegiances as half-hearted when compared to the rest of
the correspondence. It’s important, however, to remember the geopolitical context against which
she was writing. The Austrian officers and soldiers she sees remind her of the “oppression”
Milanese and Venetian people had endured in the wake of their independence. In October 1849,
Italy was far from the United Kingdom of Italy we now know: when John and Effie Ruskin were
travelling from Brig to Milan and to Venice, they moved southward from the peaceful Swiss
landscape to Italian cities that had endured the Austrian siege for longer and longer periods
before surrendering: Austria seized control of the Milanese on 18 March 1849 and of the
Venetians on 22 March 1849; the Milanese surrendered on 7 August 1848, while the Venetians
followed suit over a year later on 22 August 1849.
Effie Ruskin’s reference to “oppression” perhaps appears as fleeting moment of empathy,
especially since the rest of the paragraph is full of details about the Austrian officers and
soldiers; however, her polite, if overwrought, avowal, which couples her surrogate patriotism
with an articulation of moral (self)-government, reveals her tacit sympathies with the Milanese
265
and the Venetians over the Austrians she has encountered so far. The patriotism Effie Ruskin
feels on behalf of these Italians may be fleeting for good reason: the Veronese and the Venetian
republics were fleeting. It’s easy for biographers to attribute the line to Effie Ruskin’s supposed
fickleness; however, her abrupt shift from the Austrian officers and soldiers to a much more
polite reference to “oppression” reminds us that this second republic was short-lived and just
vaguely realized between March 1848 and April 1849. Effie Ruskin’s October 1849 letter
demonstrates her sense of heightened empathy for Italians as she prepares to travel from Milan to
Venice. Perhaps she realizes she is moving from a city that had surrendered to the Austrians
over a year ago to one that was still coming to terms with Italians’ relinquished hopes for a
republic. Effie Ruskin’s letters are filled with language that conveys this queasy empathy with
Milanese and with Venetian people in the wake of occupation. Milan and Venice are still
beautiful, she writes, but her impressions of these cities are often overwhelmed by Austrian
occupation. For instance, in a letter to her father written just one day earlier (27 October 1849),
she confesses that she sympathizes with the Milanese: “This is a delightful place, still in a state
of siege and therefore melancholy, full of Austrians & Croat Soldiery, the best dressed and finest
looking men I ever saw in their white coats & tight blue Italy trowsers. The people are very
unhappy and complain dreadfully of the way in which they were betrayed to Radetzky by
Charles Albert” (52–53). Ultimately, if Effie Ruskin is accused of parroting John’s antirepublicanism, then her correspondence from 27 and 28 October 1849 shows how she was, in
fact, responding to what she saw in Milan (and later, in Venice) on her own terms. During this
period, her sympathies lay with Milanese and Venetian civilians—though not necessarily
republican leaders—much more than they do with the ubiquitous Austrian officers and
soldiers.193
193
In the letters she wrote to her mother and father when she was travelling from Milan to Venice, she never
266
When John and Effie Ruskin were travelling from Milan to Venice, she empathized with
Italians by villainizing Austrian officers and soldiers through cultural stereotypes that would
have been recognizable to her mother and father back in Perth. She criticizes the Austrians as
Austrians by calling attention to their bad manners: they gawk, they flirt, and they smoke, as
they parade around the city on their horses. For Effie Ruskin, the Milanese occupation doesn’t
resemble martial law as much as it does a spectacle of Habsburg masculinity. Her interest in
recent political history is often overlooked in biocritical readings that emphasize Effie Ruskin’s
own supposed gawking and flirting; biographers who emphasize her romantic scandals with John
Ruskin and with John Everett Millais also suggest that this period was defined by tête-à-têtes
with Austrian officers in Venice, especially one called Charles Paulizza. Yet I argue that this
letter isn’t just the first in a series of coy accounts of her relationships with Austrian officers.
For when she writes “I am a thorough Italian here & hate oppression, therefore I wish them far
enough,” she suggests her empathy for Italians in Milan overshadows any interest in Austrians.
Yet the October 1849 letter also reveals Effie Ruskin’s self-consciousness about the
Austrian men. It is, like many of the letters she wrote from Italy between 1849 and 1852, filled
with references to officers and soldiers and, especially, to General Joseph Radetzky. By the new
year, John and Effie Ruskin were accustomed to socializing with Austrians stationed in Venice.
They were well-regarded by John Ruskin and by his mother and father, who maintained antirepublican dispositions throughout the mid-nineteenth century; Effie, as we’ll see, came to
respect the Austrians, both personally and politically, even as she developed deep empathy for
mentions her husband’s personal beliefs about the political crises unfolding around them; in fact, Effie never
mentions his beliefs at all, during the 1849–1850 trip or during the 1851–1852 trip. For John Ruskin’s descriptions
of post-Risorgimento Milan, Venice, and Verona, see Ruskin’s Letters from Venice 1851–1852, most of which were
written to his mother and father. John Ruskin rarely mentions Effie’s beliefs about Italians and Austrians to his
parents either. While he assumed they shared his anti-republican beliefs, it’s unclear whether he was aware of Effie
Ruskin’s—perhaps short-lived—republican disposition during this period.
267
the Venetians she encountered throughout the city. Yet it’s clear her interest in these Austrian
officers and soldiers was—at least at first—circumspect. In the same letter to her father, she
anticipates the manner in which the Milanese occupation may be indicative of the AustroVenetian tension she will soon witness: “I think we shall enjoy our stay at Venice very much
and as they are doing all they can to propitiate the Austrians we may go out a little” (55).
By the end of the letter, then, Effie Ruskin tempers her (perhaps overwrought) surrogate
patriotism or nationalism: she hopes for Austro-Venetian peace, even if it’s just so that she can
leave the Hotel Danieli. Effie Ruskin’s worry that Italians might renege on the armistice with
the Austrians was a real one, grounded in the news she and her husband had been following from
April to August 1849. People were still starving and dying from cholera in Venice (where John
and Effie Ruskin arrived by 13 November 1849) because of the blockade Austrians had
maintained during the spring and the summer. She had every right to be concerned that this city
might have returned to its recent, volatile state.
Between October 1849 and November 1851, Effie Ruskin turns from identifying with
Italians to feeling so absorbed with Austrian soldiers and officers that she imagines herself as the
author of a book about “the name” under which “all nations” exist: Austria (223). In a letter to
her mother dated 30 November 1851, she writes, “I think I should write a book about the
Austrians I meet for under that name are all nations, I think” (223). Couched between a
description of a tea she held at her Venetian rooms and a laundry list of the cosmopolitan women
whom she encounters at her various “soirées,” Effie Ruskin’s mention of the book may be easy
to dismiss. In the rest of the letter, she names the sophisticated and well-to-do Austrians who
populate her social circle, and it may be difficult to imagine that this “book” would cover the
political realities she’s come to know so well during her two stays. Yet Effie Ruskin’s—perhaps
268
offhand—interest in Austria as a nation, not just in the officers, the soldiers, or the well-dressed
ladies suggests that this is also her articulation of Austria’s cultural dominance in Milan, in
Venice, and in Verona during the period. Of course, Effie Ruskin was well aware of Austria’s
control over much of Europe, and her personal relationships with these people illuminated, rather
than diminished, her political understanding of the world, even if her letters to her mother and
father read as coy pretenses.
Indeed, Effie Ruskin’s interest in Austria—as much as the Austrian officers and soldiers
with whom she famously fraternized—is important, for it suggests her appreciation of post-1849
Austro-Venetian relations became increasingly tempered. For as she reckons her immediate,
face-to-face experiences with what may have been strictly republican or strictly anti-republican
dispositions, her ideas about civic belonging change: she no longer calls herself a “thorough
Italian,” but this doesn’t mean that she abandons her allegiances to the Milanese and the
Venetians in favor of the Austrians. In fact, the letter to her mother shows how she’s interested
in the very complex relationships that govern Milanese and Venetian people with respect to
Austria as a “nation.” For while her letter seems to elide Austria (the nation) with Austrians (the
people), it’s clear that she is thinking about this empire in order to spell out the relational identity
of Milan and of Venice to the rest of the world: the grammar of the phrase “for under that name
are all nations” emphasizes both the collectivity and the singularity of the Austrian Empire.
Austrians, the line intimates, have a nation and a nationality separate from the states they control.
Yet they are also defined, in part, by these states. It’s revealing that Effie explains this
complicated political structure by rendering the other “nations” unnamed direct objects, while
Austria appears as the plural and the personified (and perhaps the royal) “Austrians.” Still, Effie
Ruskin’s bon-mot synopsis of Austro-Italian relations is bookended by a hesitation, or a seeming
269
hesitation: “I think…I think.” At first glance, the bookending phrase reads like a strange
equivocation, for it suggests her insistence as much as her hesitation. To be sure, Effie Ruskin’s
professed desire to author a book interrupts the letter, and the repetition may be her attempt to
soften her serious interest in the political landscape she’s come to know through (for instance)
Madame Pallavicini, Madame Jablonowska (“who only eats grapes”), and General Reischach
(223). Effie Ruskin was, it seems, thirsty for intellectual company. Ultimately, this letter shows
how her correspondence is defined by meaningful ambivalence.
Effie Ruskin’s introduction to Venetian politics and aesthetics is framed by a magnificent
account of Leondardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, which she and John saw just before leaving
Milan. Even this famous fresco is affected by the Austrian officers and soldiers who had held
the city under martial law since 7 August 1848. The Last Supper, Effie Ruskin writes (in the 28
October letter to her father),
is much faded and dimmed, but still the hand of the great master is visible
throughout, and the centre figure, Our Lord, is full of dignity and sweetness but
the whole place was very sad to see, on the Entrance door the Large black
Austrian Eagle painted, showing it was a Barrack, with soldiers looking out of
every window, the Cloister full of them smoking and playing at dice and the
centre of a receptacle for all the refuse from the cavalry stables on one side. (54)
The Austrians were, as Effie Ruskin attests, the most recent officers and soldiers to damage the
fresco by using the cloister and the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie as a temporary station
(French soldiers had done the same during the 1790s). The fresco began peeling as early as the
mid-sixteenth century, less than fifty years after da Vinci painted it on the plaster walls. Effie
Ruskin’s sustained interest in the details of the crest—her description of the eagle is as fleeting
270
as the fresco itself—reminds us that her pilgrimage to da Vinci’s masterpiece is meaningfully
affected by present-tense Austro-Milanese tensions. In fact, she turns from Christ, “the centre
figure,” to the eagle within the crest that heralded her entrance to the room. Having turned from
the fresco back to the door, she lingers over the Austrian officers and soldiers whose bodies are
framed, from her perspective, within the cloister windows.
Ultimately, this letter isn’t a religious meditation on Christ’s prophecy that the twelve
apostles would betray him. It is, instead, an anecdote about the strange collisions between
biblical history and Austria’s occupation in Milan—and within Santa Maria delle Grazie. Still,
by describing the Austrian officers’ and soldiers’ idleness in such close proximity to the fresco,
Effie Ruskin implies that their bellicose lassitude is a sacrilege. The iconographic “Austrian
Eagle” may be as central as the Christ, then, for she sees it on the door before entering the
monastery, and it haunts the description of Santa Maria delle Grazie she sends to her father after
leaving Milan for Venice. Effie Ruskin’s impressions of The Last Supper and Santa Maria delle
Grazie reveal the Grand-Tourist urge she has to reconcile past and present at touchstone cultural
sites. Yet while a Grand Tourist may have been able to forget her present surroundings, and to
find herself lost in the past, Effie Ruskin’s letter suggests that this post-1848 moment resulted in
a lingering sense of immediacy. For if a Grand Tourist perceived Italian masterpieces, including
The Last Supper, to be relics of continuity, linking the past to the present and affirming Italy’s
identity as a mnemonic registrar for the Continent, then Effie Ruskin’s description shows how
mid-nineteenth-century history changed the masterpieces themselves. The Last Supper appears
smokier to Effie Ruskin: it’s not just dust from the seventeenth century or soot from Napoleonic
exploits during the eighteenth century; it’s also Austrian cigars. Effie Ruskin’s emphasis on
Austria’s militarization and secularization of Santa Maria delle Grazie renders the damage an
271
almost anti-Catholic critique of da Vinci’s plastered narrative: for if she is put off by the
Austrians, then she is, as the rest of the correspondence attests, put off by the Italians’ often
unwavering faith in the Pope and the Catholic Church, institutions that didn’t always—or
consistently—support secular efforts for self-government during this period. Still, Effie
Ruskin’s religious critique is subtle, and as disorienting as her movement from the Christ to the
Austrian Eagle may be, it’s clear she appreciates Milan in part because it is a place where past
and present redefine one another.
Indeed, Effie Ruskin’s detailed accounts of post-revolution and post-armistice sites often
overwhelm her cool interest in Grand-Tourist mainstays. To be sure, her letters are filled with
descriptions of Venetian institutions: the Hotel Danieli (where she and Ruskin stayed), the Caffè
Florian, the Piazza San Marco, the Basilica San Marco, the Palazzo Ducale, the Canal Grande,
daytrips to Murano and to Trieste, and, perhaps most famously, the Carnival (during the second,
not the first, trip). Yet she also describes daytrips to see the bombproof towers in Verona and the
barracks at San Giuliano, the island from which Austrian officers and soldiers commanded their
famous air-balloon siege of Venice. Rather than recording wistful impressions of Titians and
Veroneses or sketching Gothic architecture with her husband, Effie Ruskin catalogues
sightseeing tours—that were largely self-directed—of mid-nineteenth-century sites. Wellregarded Austrian military leaders Field Marshall Wimpffen and First Lieutenant Charles
Paulizza accompanied Effie Ruskin during these daytrips, affording her firsthand perspectives of
Austro-Veronese and Austro-Venetian tensions.
Effie Ruskin befriended Field Marshall Wimpffen almost as soon as she set foot in
Verona, and by the first week in November, she arranged her desired, if iconoclastic, itineraries.
In a letter to her mother dated 8 November 1849, she writes that her “acquaintance of the other
272
evening,” General Kölun, whom she’d met in Verona, “is likely to prove very useful”; he’d
introduced her to Field Marshall Wimpffen, who was stationed in Venice (59–60). Field
Marshall Wimpffen, “a very distinguished officer,” she writes, “came to us next day to call and
on asking what we should like to see I said I should like very much to see the inside of the
bombproof and fortified Towers outside the town overhanging the city on the line of Hills which
kept the Veronese in such terror that they never revolted” (60). It’s clear that Effie Ruskin was
dazzled by the Austrian officers and soldiers who encircled Wimpffen: she confuses his sons,
Count Victor and Count Alphonse, calling the latter “Count Albert or some other such name,”
but she is sure to note to her mother that he “lives with Radetzky” (60). Indeed, she seems
impressed that Wimpffen and Radetzky work in such close quarters: Wimpffen “said he would
have great pleasure” in taking her to see the towers, “and he would ask Radetzky to give him
three hours in the afternoon, for they never have any leisure and are kept hard at work the whole
day, at least those on staff, till tea-time” (60).
Effie Ruskin’s burgeoning friendships with Field Marshall Wimpffen, the counts, the
generals, and the other officers and soldiers shouldn’t, however, be read as evidence of
unequivocal Austrian allegiances or as anti-Veronese, anti-Venetian sentiments. For if we take
Effie Ruskin’s Austrian-guided tours seriously, then the letters she wrote to her parents reveal
her interests in what remained of the war-torn Veneto landscape in the wake of their revolution.
Unlike her husband, who was worried about recording the Gothic details of bridges and
buildings, she understood Italy through present-tense relations among the Milanese, the
Veronese, the Venetians, and the Austrians.
When Field Marshall Wimpffen arrived to escort the Ruskins on their tour of
fortifications that had led to Austrian successes in Verona and in Venice, John refused to join
273
Effie. In the letter she wrote to her mother on 8 November, she describes her shock at John’s
apathy:
He came into my room whilst I was dressing, and I said, ‘Are you not ready John
to go with us?’ ‘Oh! dear no,’ said he, ‘what possible interest have I in lines of
fortification? I never intended to go and not having to walk with you today I shall
have such a famous drawing day. Count Wimpffen is exceedingly intelligent &
modest, a very nice companion for you & Charlotte, just the sort of person who it
is good for you to be with and I daresay it makes him very happy too. George
[Hobbs] shall accompany you if you think proper.’ I said, ‘Well, John, I don’t
think you would be understood by the world at all.’ ‘Oh, no,’ said he, ‘never. I
think it very absurd that because I enjoy myself, you & Charlotte should be kept
moping in the house.’ With this he took us down stairs and telling our companion
he gave us into his charge, and the young man laying his hand on his heart and
making a low bow, we went on our drive, saw the fortifications, had them
explained to us and thought that if the Veronese did get up an émeute they would
all be blown in the air before they knew where they were. The view was splendid
and he pointed out to us the different fields of Battle where they fought Charles
Albert. (60)
Effie Ruskin’s comment, “John, I don’t think you understand the world at all,” may be the most
shocking sentence in the letter, for it shows how subtly attuned she was to her husband’s almost
monomaniacal obsession with a bygone period. Indeed, once the Ruskins were settled in Venice,
Effie realized that Austrians and Venetians alike regarded John as an eccentric.194 Effie Ruskin
194
For critics who discuss John Ruskin’s “eccentric” persona during the 1849–1850 and the 1851–1852 trips, see
especially Rose and Hibbert. “According to Effie [Ruskin],” Hibbert writes, “the Venetians found [John] more
274
knew, then, as early as November 1849, that her interests in present-tense Italy were quite
different from John’s chosen historical subjects in The Stones of Venice.
Her daytrips with Wimpffen—and later with Paulizza—didn’t constitute a postrevolution, post-bombardment Grand Tour. She seems, instead, to have envisioned a mode of
travel much more akin to battlefield tourism or war tourism.195 Indeed, John and Effie Ruskin
belonged to a generation of Italophiles who came of age when the Grand-Tour itinerary, which
had been standardized for well-to-do gentlemen across the eighteenth and the early nineteenth
centuries, was almost obsolete. By the 1840s, railway transit made travel much more affordable
for an emerging middle class; it changed what—and how—people saw when they travelled to the
Continent. In fact, when the Vicenza railway station, part of the Milan-Venice railway, opened
in 1846, it transformed travellers’ first impressions of Venice, not only because the perspective
afforded by carriages (aboard trains) and the perspective afforded by boats were very different,
but also because these modes of transportation delivered people to different parts of the city.
John Ruskin witnessed the change from boat to carriage arrival, since it happened between his
eccentric than endearing as he walked about the city with this sketchpads, notebooks and daguerreotypes, poking
about churches and palaces, not recognizing or at least not acknowledging acquaintances whom he passed in the
street” (265).
195
While “battlefield tourism” or “war tourism” (often elided with “battlefield journalism” or “war journalism”) are
usually applied to contemporary journalists, the phenomenon may be useful for understanding writers as various as
Effie Ruskin and Margaret Fuller, whose personal experiences overseas are framed by their involvement in political
events: battles, wars, and revolutions. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley put a term to the phenomenon in their book
Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster, which argues that this twentieth-century phenomenon is
driven by people’s desire to see places where “acts of inhumanity are celebrated as heritage sites.” “Dark Tourism”
is most often associated with the First and the Second World Wars and the Vietnam War. When survivors returned
to concentration camps and to battlefields from these wars years later, they would often find abandoned tanks,
abandoned hangars, and newly built museums where crucial battles had been fought. Ultimately, as Lennon and
Foley’s book attests, it’s often difficult to distinguish between “dark tourism” and voyeurism or something much
more sinister. “Dark Tourism” may be different, then, from the “battlefield tourism” or the “war tourism” we might
discern in Margaret Fuller’s or in Effie Ruskin’s public/private letters. Lennon and Foley, in fact, argue that this
phenomenon is distinctly “modern” for two reasons: “First, there is the simple matter of chronological distance.
[Earlier revolutions and wars] did not take place within the memories of those still alive to validate them. Second,
[these earlier revolutions and wars] do not posit questions or introduce anxiety and doubt about modernity and its
consequences” (12). While I’m not suggesting that Effie Ruskin is guilty of the “commodification and
commercialization” at issue for Lennon and for Foley, I do think it’s useful to think of some of her letters as
intermediaries between Grand-Tour travelogues and something much more akin to twentieth-century battlefield
tourism or war tourism (12).
275
childhood and his early adulthood trips to the city. When he travelled to Venice with his mother
and father for the first time in 1835, he would have had his first glimpses of the city from the
water’s edge.
It’s clear that this waterside perspective of the city, which had become familiar during his
subsequent trips during the early 1840s, guided his historical imagination. In the first chapter of
the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853), he writes,
In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not
be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly by the
power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and
partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of the last hill he
had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest,
scattered among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hopedfor turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the
towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of peaceful and
thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is
perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent,—in those days, I say, when there
was something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each
successive halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by
the traveller than that which brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola
shot into the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the aspect of the
city itself was generally the source of some slight disappointment, for, seen in this
direction, its buildings are far less characteristic than those of the other great
276
towns of Italy; but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more than
atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out of the midst, as it
seemed, of the deep sea, for it was impossible, that the mind or the eye could at
once comprehend which stretched away in the leagues of rippling lustre to the
north and south, or trace the narrow line of islets bounding it to the east. The salt
breeze, the white moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and
disappearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance of the steady
tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on whose bosom the great city rested
so calmly…. (57–58)196
When John and Effie Ruskin arrived in Venice in November 1849, they arrived by boat, not by
carriage, because the Vicenza railway station, which had opened just three years before, was
inaccessible due to Austrian attacks and Venetian counter-attacks. Effie Ruskin’s letters remind
us, Lutyens writes, that “the railway bridge into Venice, inaugurated in January 1846, was out of
action, forty of its two hundred and twenty-two arches having been destroyed during the
bombardment, five of them by the Venetians themselves when they were forced to evacuate Fort
Malghera on May 26, 1849” (63). The shelling, which ended only days before the Ruskins left
Perth and London for the Continent, destroyed Venice’s newly industrializing, newly
modernizing infrastructure. It also afforded John and Effie Ruskin with a traditional—GrandTour-esque—entrée to the city and with a firsthand view of the damage sustained during the
spring and the summer sieges.
Effie Ruskin’s first glimpses of Venice are, however, much more disturbing than those
water’s edge remembrances her husband elegizes in The Stones of Venice. In some ways her
196
In the travellers’ editions, this is the second chapter, entitled “The Throne.” “The Throne” was the first chapter
John Ruskin drafted after his 1849–1850 trip to Venice with Effie.
277
arrival did—and in some ways it didn’t—fulfill his vision of “hours of peaceful and thoughtful
pleasure” (57). In some ways it did—and in some ways it didn’t—resemble a Grand Tourist’s
anticipated entrée. While Effie Ruskin is overwhelmed by Venice’s beauty, she also notices,
almost immediately, that this city had been shaken by the Austrian occupation and
bombardment. In a letter to her mother dated 13 November 1849, she describes her transfer from
the railway to a boat: “We had a delightful sail across the Lagune [sic] from Mestre on Saturday
having passed Vicenza and Padua in the railway. Formerly it brought you into Venice across the
Lagune but parts of the Bridge were thrown down during the Bombardment and they are now
repairing it” (Effie in Venice 66). Effie Ruskin notices that, like Milan and like Verona, Venice
is crowded by Austrian officers and soldiers. Yet the buildings, the bridges, and the railways
also bear the damage of the air-balloon raids that forced Venetians to surrender on 22 August
1849, just two months earlier.
Though Effie Ruskin had dubbed herself a “thorough Italian” just two weeks earlier (in
response to her distaste for Austrian officers and soldiers), she’s now critical, if mockingly
critical, of Radetzky for leaving the railway even partially intact after the revolution and the
bombardment:
If I was Radetzky not one stone of it should be left on another. It completely
destroys your first impressions of Venice and it cost the Italians £150,000, and no
good has come of it so far & the everlasting shame besides of turning half their
Churches into Mills because they can’t be troubled to keep them in order, covered
with invaluable Frescoes of Titian, Giorgione, the Bellinis & others and giving all
that money for a Railway bridge, but they have been dreadfully punished
already…. (66)
278
Effie Ruskin’s tongue-in-cheek hypothetical may be a perverse caricature both of Radetzky and
of Venetians, for, as Lutyens argues, she “was most unfair to the Venetians here. The Austrians
had heavily taxed them to pay for the bridge which greatly facilitated their own use of the
valuable port of Venice” (66). It’s true that Effie Ruskin was dazzled by Radetzky’s political
successes, especially by 1851–1852, and her correspondence reveals that she’d hoped to catch a
glimpse of him during her first and her second Venetian stays.197 Yet the November 1849 letter
isn’t simply a tribute to Radetzky, just is it isn’t simply a critique of Venetians’ economic
sacrifices, not to mention the much more serious sacrifices to which she alludes, elliptically,
when she says “they have been dreadfully punished already.” Effie Ruskin’s concerns about the
Titians, the Giorgiones, and the Bellinis may be influenced by the scene she witnessed at Santa
Maria delle Grazie. Santa Lucia, a church on the northern end of the Grand Canal, was
destroyed in order for a railway station to be built in 1846; the railway station was subsequently
named after the church, and it served as the primary station in Venice from 1846 to 1849
(Hibbert 284). Ultimately, as Lutyens argues, the Austrian officers, soldiers, and merchants
were, perhaps, as culpable as the Venetians, if not more, because they realized that this city
would be a valuable port once it was connected to the railways emerging across a not-yet unified
Italy during the 1830s and the 1840s.
Still, while Effie Ruskin may have had an oversimplified understanding of the Venetians’
complicity in industrializing and modernizing efforts, the 13 November letter isn’t as naïve as
Lutyens intimates. For it suggests that Effie Ruskin came to understand Venice’s stalled
industrialization and modernization as the primary reason why her arrival by boat was even
197
Ultimately, she did meet him face-to-face when she returned to Venice in 1851. She mentions Radetzky in
letters to her mother dated 8 November 1849, 22 December 1849, 10 September 1851, 8 February 1852, 16
February 1852 and many others. In the letter from 8 November 1849, Effie Ruskin complains that she and John had
just missed Radetzky while travelling from Verona to Venice; Radetzky was travelling in the opposte direction.
279
possible. Had she not travelled in the wake of the bombardment, she would have arrived in a
carriage loaded on a train, and she would have arrived at the southern, rather than the northern,
end of the Grand Canal. What may have seemed merely passé before the revolution and the
bombardment was, for Effie Ruskin, a decidedly present-tense experience. Indeed, the
unfinished “then” clause following Effie Ruskin’s “if” addresses her post-bombardment mode of
transit as much as it addresses Radetzky or the Venetians: this paragraph is a tongue-in-cheek
ode to Radetzky only insofar as it allows her “first impressions” she would have missed had she
travelled by rail.198 The redoubled irony in Effie Ruskin’s letter is that this bombardment
enabled her to arrive in Venice like the pre-industrialized, pre-modernized tourists her husband
would later describe in The Stones of Venice. Yet she can’t help but describe her old-fashioned
arrival through language that shows how arresting the recent bombardment was—even for firsttime travellers. Effie Ruskin’s “first impressions” are, then, anything but nostalgic. Ultimately,
the 13 November letter is haunted by a telling, if subtle, dissonance: her awareness that this
almost obsolete mode of transportation from the sea to the lagoon and to the canals was a novelty
for post-1846 travellers.
As we’ll see, the letters Effie Ruskin wrote (from November 1849 to January 1850,
especially) reveal that she was, in fact, deeply troubled by the fallout of pre- and postbombardment economic crises, which she witnessed from the safe distance of her gondola and
her hotel, but also in her face-to-face interactions with Venetian people. Indeed, her “first
impressions” often set the beauty of the Venetian cityscape and the horrors of the Austrian
198
It may be useful to compare John and Effie Ruskin’s interests in the differences between travelling by rail and by
boat to Henry James’s discussions of post-revolutionary transit throughout Italian Hours (1909). Italian Hours is, in
many ways, a meditation on modes of transportation and on time. James muses about the manner in which railway
schedules quicken his sense of time: days of travel become hours and minutes between 1869, when he first traveled
to Rome, and 1909, when he published Italian Hours. Between 1869 and 1909—indeed, between 1869 and the
early 1870s, when he enjoyed much more sustained visits to Rome, to Florence, and to Venice—the peninsula was
unified into a single nation-state.
280
occupation and bombardment against one another in disquieting ways. This startling
juxtaposition reminds us that Effie Ruskin’s letters are products both of what she did—and
didn’t—want to see and of what she did—and didn’t—want to document in her day-to-day
correspondence with her family. For instance, in the letter she wrote to her mother about her
arrival—and about the destroyed railway bridge—Effie Ruskin also claims that the 1849
blockade was imperceptible by late fall. Against Chamonix, she writes Venice “is most
delicious, always mild, never damp, the skies and sunsets of the most heavenly colours, and the
sea and canals so fresh & calm & green with the streets of Palaces, and no marks of the year-&a-half blockade they are just recovering from. It is the most exquisite place I have ever seen and
we shall not quit it in a hurry if I can help it, and at any rate not till this time next month” (64–
65). Ultimately, if the 13 November letter shows how Venice would require years, not months,
to recover from the air-balloon raids, then it is also a testament to her self-conscious indifference.
Ambivalence governed the ways Effie Ruskin came to understand and reconcile her “first
impressions” of Venice: it may be why, within one letter, she claims both to see—and not to
see—vestiges of the 1848 revolution and the 1849 bombardment. When she writes in her letter
from 13 November that she hopes not to “quit [Venice] in a hurry if [she] can help it,” her
equivocating language suggests that imminent departure would be voluntary. Yet it’s clear John
Ruskin had no intention of leaving Venice (or his drawings of the buildings and the bridges)
without a pressing reason. It’s hard not to wonder whether this line is, in fact, an allusion to the
immediate political crises she says she can’t discern in the recently bombed canals and streets.
For as the letter from 28 October attests (as long as Venetians continue “to propitiate the
Austrians we may go out a little”), Effie Ruskin realized that her ability to travel freely along the
canals and the streets and her ability to sightsee were predicated on sustained peace between the
281
two parties (55). The letter from 13 November reminds us that Williams’s argument (about Effie
Ruskin’s sensitivity to Venetian “misery”) and that Cooper’s argument (about her insensitivity,
even self-conscious insensitivity) cannot be read in isolation; instead, they ought to be read in
light of one another. Effie Ruskin’s “first impressions” of Venice are, as this single letter attests,
ambivalent. Even more important, however, is the fact that this ambivalence is a defining feature
of her daily correspondence. Ambivalence characterizes her immediate mood, then, as much as
it does her gradually unfolding allegiances to the Milanese, the Veronese, the Venetians, and the
Austrians over the months and the years when she travelled to the Veneto. Just as Bullen argues
that “The Stones of Venice is not one work, but many,” so, too, is Effie Ruskin’s correspondence
(502). The letter from 13 November is one of many that demonstrate what Bullen terms an
“antiphonic” collision of discourses (502). Bullen’s term is helpful both for understanding Effie
Ruskin’s letters and for understanding Williams’ and Cooper’s conflicting interpretations, since
it emphasizes the nonlinearity of texts John—and Effie—Ruskin wrote during this period. Her
simultaneous awareness—and then self-conscious unawareness—of the bombardment upon her
arrival may be her most striking “antiphonic” moment, for it shows how sensitive she was to the
stultifying détente that defined 1849–1850 Venice.
Indeed, if we read ambivalence as a defining characteristic of the 1849–1850 letters, it
may be easier place Effie Ruskin within existing discussions of nineteenth-century travel. Many
critics (including Lutyens, Norwich, and Batchelor) have noted that this was a strange time for
John and Effie Ruskin to travel to Venice. Effie Ruskin's letters to her family are, Lutyens
writes, records of Venice “at a time when the Grand Tourists had long since departed and the
Cook’s tourists had not yet arrived—consequently a time about which very little has been written
in English” (3–4). “It was an odd time to come to Venice,” Norwich agrees, and “the Ruskins
282
were almost certainly the first foreign visitors to arrive since the collapse of the Revolution. The
Austrian army had just reoccupied the city, everything was still in chaos after the fighting and
piles of Austrian cannon still blocked both the narthex of St. Mark’s and the arcade of the Doge’s
Palace” (99). Batchelor echoes Lutyens and Norwich: “November 1849 was a strange time for
English visitors to stay in Venice. […] Many of the Venetians were desperate, indeed starving.
The best Italian families had left during the bombardment, and there were very few English. On
the other hand, it was cheap” (87). Lutyens, Norwich, and Batchelor are right to say that this
was an in-between time for travellers, including John and Effie Ruskin.
John and Effie Ruskin weren’t Grand Tourists, and they weren’t Cook’s tourists, but they
also weren’t an anomaly. In fact, Effie Ruskin’s mid-century Venetian stays are contemporary
with a decade that witnessed major discursive shifts in travelogue writing. For as James Buzard
argues in The Beaten Track, this period witnessed shifts from “tourism” to “antitourism,”
meaning that as Continental travel became more and more economically accessible to people,
what they saw and how they saw it changed as well. Michie (via Buzard) usefully distinguishes
between “touristic” and “antitouristic” sightseeing in her discussion of the Ruskins’
“honeymoon” to Venice. While “touristic” sightseers move from established landmark to
established landmark with predetermined, fixated gazes, “antitouristic” sightseers are less
scripted: they choose unconventional and untraditional sites, they follow itineraries that don’t
build toward self-conscious narrative/metanarrative “climaxes,” and their glances are averted as
often as they are defined by deliberate, sexual or sexualized, looking.199 To borrow Buzard’s,
199
Michie outlines rhetorical connections between “sexual looking” and “sightseeing” in order to supplement
Buzard’s otherwise ungendered discussion of the “touristic”/“antitouristic”: “If we consider the act of looking on
the honeymoon we cannot ignore—as the Victorians also could not—the honeymoon’s constitutive sexual act. We
have seen in the case of the Ruskins that looking or choosing not to look had consequences in the realm of the
sexual. In the Ruskins’ case the relation between the sexual gaze and the touristic gaze was especially complex; if
we believe that Ruskin was disgusted by the difference between Effie’s body and the classical female nude, the
connections between sexual looking and sightseeing become very powerful” (76). I hesitate to read John and Effie
283
Michie’s, and Bullen’s terms, then, Effie Ruskin’s travel writing is both “antiphonic” and
“antitouristic.” She realized that this was a strange time to see the Veneto. Her letters are filled
with descriptions of touristic and antitouristic landmarks; with sympathetic and not-so
sympathetic depictions of Austrians; with sympathetic and not-so sympathetic depictions of
Italians; with conventional, traditional, and even trite references to Venetian institutions (she is,
like her predecessors, often self-conscious about the fact that she’s describing places countless
other people had described before); and with anecdotes that are jarring because they remind us of
a much more immediate and violent past. By focusing attention on the manner in which Effie
Ruskin’s correspondence upends our preconceptions about post-revolution, post-bombardment
modes of travel, we may be able to reconsider why some of her observations are so jarring—and
why her ambivalence is much more complicated than biographers have suggested.
During her first full week in Venice, Effie Ruskin describes two incidents that highlight
this strange intermingling between touristic and antitouristic sightseeing. On 15 November, she
describes the homeless people she sees while walking from the St. Mark’s Square to the Hotel
Danieli each evening; on 19 November, she recounts an afternoon she spent at the Doge’s Palace
with John and Ker. The letter from 15 November, addressed to George, contains one of the most
oft-quoted passages from her 1849–1850 correspondence, since, for many, it shows how
unthinking and unfeeling she was in the face of Venetian poverty:
Many of the Italians here appear to have no homes at all and to be perfectly
happy. At eight o’clock in the evening when we return from hearing the Band we
Ruskin’s 1849–1850 letters through such superimpositions. I don’t think it’s necessary to read “the sexual gaze”
and “the touristic gaze” together through a conceit of meta/narrative climax, because “the antitouristic gaze” isn’t,
finally, dependent on what Effie Ruskin did or didn’t do in bed with John. Yet Michie’s argument that this belated
honeymoon shows how John and Effie Ruskin developed “an antitouristic form of sightseeing” that was defined by
averted glances as much as it was by guided, travelogued expectations is useful (12). Michie’s distinction between
“touristic” and “antitouristic” sightseeing is especially provocative, since it suggests that this kind of travel didn’t
assume meta/narrative climaxes in itineraries often associated with predetermined pilgrimages from site to site.
Effie Ruskin’s unusual tours in Verona and in Venice may be well situated within this new critical framework.
284
see them all lying packed together at the edge of the bridges, wrapped in their
immense brown cloaks and large hoods as warm as fires. Then in the morning
there are little stands on all parts of the Quay where they can get hot fish, rice
soup, hot elder wine, all kinds of fruit, cigars, and this eating al fresco goes on the
whole day, with the occasional interruption of Punch or a Juggler or a storyteller
when immediately an immense crowd is collected. Here also some of the
Austrian Infantry are exercised and sometimes it is very merry and exciting.
(Effie in Venice 69–70)
John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers have argued that this paragraph epitomizes her (supposedly)
inhumane attitude toward Italian people. (It’s worth noting that this passage is often paired with
the “thorough Italian” passage in order to suggest Effie Ruskin’s flippant disposition toward the
Milanese, the Veronese, and the Venetians between October and November 1849.) Why does
she write that these people “appear,” from her perspective, both “to have no homes at all” and
“to be perfectly happy”? Effie Ruskin’s letter does reveal a certain naïveté, or feigned naïveté,
that’s hard to overlook.
While her comment about Venetians’ presumed contentment is unambiguously offensive,
it also demonstrates her absorption with, as much as her privilege within, the post-armistice
economy. Effie Ruskin was always cushioned by her mother- and father-in-law’s moderate
wealth as she (supposedly) travelled from one opulent engagement to another, a fact she couldn’t
have forgotten each night when she saw these homeless people, in passing, between two tourist-y
institutions: the Hotel Danieli and St. Mark’s Square. Yet if the Austrian Band wasn’t reminder
enough that this city was still a tumultuous place for Venetians, for Austrians, and for tourists
alike, then the homeless people she saw certainly were. From her perspective, they were ever-
285
present, and they were as central as the fourteenth-century hotel and the tenth-century basilica to
the post-armistice Venetian cityscape. In this paragraph, she follows them from morning to
evening, watching where they sleep, what they eat, who populates the streets and the canals
nearby. Her comment that these homeless people wore “cloaks” and “hoods” “as warm as fires”
is probably wishful thinking. Still, it shows how her letter becomes a confession of the poverty
she witnessed—and wished she hadn’t witnessed—during her first week in Venice. Though she
mentions the homeless people just once, her letter suggests that she looks for them each morning
and each evening. Her letter shows, then, how she’s struggling to reconcile what she is—and
isn’t—supposed to see. Her sustained gaze is unnerving, but that may be the point. It is an
articulation, if a subtle one, of the dissonance between the attention crowds conferred upon the
Punch, the Juggler, or the storyteller in the St. Mark’s Square and the unspoken expectation that
she avert her eyes from another Venetian spectacle: poverty. Read within touristic discourses,
the letter to George may be simply shocking. Read within antitouristic discourses, however, she
seems attuned to her historic circumstances, which weren’t, perhaps, as sanitized as
contemporary readers would prefer. Indeed, if we think of her letters not as Grand-Tourist
documents but as something closer to war tourism or battlefield tourism, then Effie Ruskin’s
attempts to understand the post-armistice economy are, in fact, much more nuanced than
biographers have suggested.
At the end of the letter, Effie Ruskin describes one of the most shocking political
demonstrations she witnessed firsthand during her two Venetian stays. She turns her attention
from the homeless people she sees living under the bridges between the Hotel Danieli and the St.
Mark’s Square to a fire stoked with millions of worthless lire. Her language is guarded and
rushed: “The other day an immense Fire and a large cauldron was put in the Square where they
286
burned all the paper money issued by the Provisional Government here while it lasted. I saw the
ashes of above 2,000,000 of notes. I must stop now…” (70). Next to her naïve assumption that
the homeless people’s “cloaks” and “hoods” keep them “as warm as fires,” Effie Ruskin’s
interest in the fire appears, perhaps, to be equally cavalier. Yet the number she mentions—
2,000,000 notes—is striking, and it suggests that this event crucially altered her understanding of
the post-armistice economy. By describing the cloaked and hooded homeless people and the fire
side-by-side in the 15 November letter, she shows how ever-present inequities were between
Venetians and Austrians during the fall of 1849. While the “as warm as fires” line is, at first,
shorthand for Effie Ruskin’s almost inarticulable worries about these homeless people, the fire
she recounts by the end of the letter isn’t just simile. The people who burned the Moneta
Patriottica weren’t burning it just to keep warm; they were burning it because it was useless.
The Moneta Patriottica was issued to Venetians in the wake of the revolution and the
bombardment. “Venice,” Lutyens reminds us, “contributed more to the cause of united Italy
during the 1848–9 revolution than all the other Italian cities put together” (70). The city was
desperately poor after the spring and the summer of 1848, but by September of that year, Daniele
Manin’s government raised a three-million-lire national loan, and paper notes from one to five
lire were printed; the loan was raised to five million lire by October (70).200 “As coins became
scarce,” Lutyens explains, “the troops were paid in this paper money which could be changed at
a discount for Napoleons at the National Bank” (70). The Moneta Patriottica issued between
September and December 1848, one year before the Ruskins’ arrival, were guaranteed by
wealthy patriots, signifying their economic and their political support of the short-lived republic.
200
The paper notes have the denomination (1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 lire), the year (1848), and the words Moneta Patriottica,
printed across the front; these numbers and words are framed within intricate sketches. The two-lire note has two
cherubs, one hammering a coin die and one weighing the coin, bookended between the Venetian and the Milanese
coats of arms. The three-lire note is flanked by a statuesque Neptune on the left and Justitia on the right. Each note
is hand-stamped with St. Mark’s lion on the obverse.
287
By December, though, Venetians saw another “big paper issue,” but “this time” it was
“guaranteed by the government and raised by taxes” (70). Termed the Moneta del Commune di
Venezia, these paper notes came in denominations as large as fifty or one hundred lire. The shift
from Moneta Patriottica to Moneta del Commune destroyed the Venetian economy, for by June
1849, the loan exceeded twenty-four million lire. Both the Moneta Patriottica and the Moneta
del Commune proved to be worthless in the long run, and Venetians, from the poorest to the
richest, had to sacrifice their most valuable possessions in order redeem the paper notes. During
the spring and the summer bombardment, Lutyens writes, “the rich gave their jewels and their
title deeds of their estates for the redemption of the Moneta Patriottica, but even the poorest
citizen gave what he could, down to his bed and cooking utensils” (70). Yet the most damning
financial turn came after the surrender in August 1849. When Venetians finally surrendered,
“Austria agreed to redeem the Moneta del Commune at half its value, which would have been
generous if the sum for redemption had not been raised by a special tax on the Venetians, but of
[the Moneta Patriottica] not a single lire was recognized. It was this worthless Moneta
Patriottica that Effie saw being burnt and of which she enclosed in her letter a note for two lire”
(70). Ultimately, as Hilton attests, the terms of the armistice were “designed to humiliate the
Venetians” (141).
Effie Ruskin may or may not have known the painful history of loans and paper issues,
behind the Moneta Patriottica and the Moneta del Commune when she arrived in Venice;
however, it’s clear that this demonstration helped her to realize how seriously the bombardment
and the armistice had affected Venetians. It wasn’t just that the bridges and the railways were
damaged, or that the poor were poorer and the rich had fled the city for the countryside, but that
their money was, from their perspective, better burnt than spent. Barolini questions whether
288
Effie Ruskin understood why Venetians were burning, not spending, the paper notes: “Couldn’t
she visualize through the smoke of the burning money (and to the tune of the Austrian band) the
burned-out hopes of the Venetians, the bankruptcy faced by many of the city’s oldest families,
the decay of palaces, the loss of estates?” (648–649). Effie Ruskin watches the fire, Barolini
argues “as if at a theater performance” (648). Barolini may be right to suggest that this
demonstration was shocking for Effie Ruskin, and she reads Effie Ruskin’s shock as unthinking,
unfeeling, and even voyeuristic. I suggest, however, that it shows how deeply affected she was
by the scene. Effie Ruskin’s account may be curt, but what’s lurking in her curtness is an
unflattering, but refreshingly self-aware, admission: she doesn’t understand the poverty
Venetians had endured between 1848 and 1849. Indeed, how can a person make sense of a fire
stoked with 2,000,000 paper bank notes, especially in a city where homeless men, women, and
children sleep under shelled bridges? That Effie Ruskin places the description of the homeless
people and the description of the burning money side-by-side suggests that she wasn’t nearly as
solipsistic as Barolini or the other biographers suggest. It’s almost as if the two incidents
illuminate one another, and as the letter unfolds, they suggest that Effie Ruskin’s allegiances to
Italians became evermore nuanced, even when Venetians’ present and future was uncertain.201
Effie Ruskin’s curiosity about present-tense Venice is even more striking in the next
letter she writes to her mother, dated 19 November 1849. After touring the Doge’s Palace with
201
Effie Ruskin was still writing to her mother and her brother George about the poverty she saw in Venice as late
as 5 May 1852. Against her dazzling life as a socialite and a cosmopolite, she was horrified by the aftermath of the
Austro-Venetian financial crises that resulted from the Moneta Patriottica, the Moneta del Commune, and the
summer-long bombardment. In a letter to her mother dated 5 May 1852 she writes: “…the number of people who
live here by charity is immense—30,000, out of a population of 70,000. You must not suppose that many of these
however do not live and bring up their families in comparative comfort. They are too proud or too lazy to work and
they belong to different societies in Venice which, founded in the middle ages, are still enormously rich” (306–307).
She goes on to say that the church, not the government, is responsible for helping Italian people face this poverty,
since, by paying penance to the church, they also take care of one another. Like Margaret Fuller, Effie Ruskin is
critical of Italians because she believed that the Pope and the Catholic Church were corrupt; she cites this corruption
as one of many reasons the 1848 revolution failed.
289
John and Ker, she tells her mother that the artwork she saw inside this fourteenth-century
building comes to life in contemporary Venetian people. Rather than lingering over the famous
Renaissance paintings, she turns her attention to the streets and the canals outside. She admires
Tintoretto’s Paradiso in the Great Council Chamber and then praises
the Marriage of Bacchus & Adriadne [sic], the Bacchus most lovely, crowned &
girl with vine leaves & grapes and such a face, and one can imagine exactly where
he got his model, for there is a Cigar boy on the Piazza below, the very creature
that I see every day I go out, and that is always the case here showing you that the
race is the same although much degraded to what it was, for every where you see
men, women, children & dogs here that you think have stepped out of the
canvasses of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Giorgione, the Bellinis, &c. and so
remarkably so, that we are perpetually turning in the street and saying, “Oh, there
is the boy in Tintoretto’s Mercury & the Graces,” or, “There is the Europa of Paul
Veronese.” (72)
Effie Ruskin excuses herself from the epistolary tour of Titians, Tintorettos, Veroneses,
Giorgiones, and Bellinis Mrs. Gray may have expected. In fact, she suggests that this anecdotal
diversion from the gilded chambers and the gilded hallways is important, since John’s and Ker’s
letters will contain descriptions of these Renaissance masterpieces. She writes, “if John wrote
more fully of things as they are and [Charlotte] less brilliantly you would have a truer idea of
what we see, so that if you add considerably to mine & take as much from hers you will have a
very correct idea of our doings” (72). This aside shows how self-conscious Effie Ruskin was
about what—and how—she saw things when she toured important Venetian sites, and it suggests
290
why her streetside and canalside observations complement John’s architectural catalogues of the
palace interior in meaningful ways.202
For just as she looked away from The Last Supper and toward the cloistered windows
where the Austrian officers and soldiers were themselves peering outside, she directs her
mother’s attention away from the Titians and the Veroneses to the present-tense people who are
their politicoaesthetic inheritors, and her language is undeniable offensive in places. Her letter
reveals an antitouristic realism that is markedly different from John’s and from Ker’s ekphrastic
descriptions. Unlike John’s guidebook concision and Ker’s (apparent) penchant for the
overwrought, Effie’s outward-looking preoccupations with the people she can see beyond the
cloister windows and the palace frames fill her letters home. From Effie Ruskin’s perspective,
this diversion extends Mrs. Gray’s vicarious armchair tour, displacing her from the hallowed
interiors of the Doge’s Palace to the streets and the canals that actually filled Effie Ruskin’s dayto-day experiences. The 19 November letter shows how her in situ education wasn’t just about
Tintoretto or about Veronese or even about the Palace’s Gothic architecture. It was, rather, much
more akin to the theories of civilizations, especially fallen civilizations, espoused by her husband
in his own traveloguesque history, The Stones of Venice. Indeed, her meditation on the Doge’s
Palace is about the ways humans connect past and present periods as much as it is about the
building itself. Unlike John Ruskin (for whom the masons and the chisellers motivate an
appreciation for Gothic modes), Effie is interested in an historical or an art historical imaginary
that traces continuities among Tintoretto, Veronese, and the other Renaissance tableaux vivants
she envisions in mid-nineteenth-century Venice.
202
For a much more sustained discussion of the Palazzo Ducale and The Triumph (or The Apotheosis) of Venice
(1585) adorning the ceiling in the Chamber of the Council of Ten, see chapter six. At the end of the letter Hyacinth
Robinson writes to the Princess Casamassima from Venice, he imagines that this magnificent historical painting is
destroyed by an anarchist plot. Hyacinth’s letter is significant, because it shows how he reads revolutionary history,
or a potentially revolutionary present or future, through Veronese’s sixteenth-century historiography.
291
In fact, the next letter she writes to her mother, dated 24 November 1849, describes their
gondolier in terms of Giorgione: “our Gondolier, who is a very handsome fellow of the fine
Giorgione red brown complexion, rowed us fast home” from St. Martin’s where she’d heard a
mass for the dead (75). Effie Ruskin’s art historical imaginary, which elides past and present and
superimposes Giorgione’s signature umber on contemporary Venetians, is, in many ways,
offensive. It naturalizes the singularity of the Venetian cityscape and the Venetian people
through a painter’s signature color. Titian blue is Titian blue not only because the color
characterizes his paintings, but also because his paintings popularized a color that was,
ultimately, synonymous with the Italian sky as much as it was with the Italian painter’s name;
the color, which was produced with lapis lazuli, was originally imported from the East, but it was
introduced to Western European artists through Venetian ports. In this way, Titian blue and
Giorgione umber function as chromatic indices for Venice. By associating Giorgione with their
Venetian gondolier, who epitomizes the Venetian gondolier as a stock figure much more
generally, she bridges the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Taken together, Effie Ruskin’s
anecdotes aestheticize post-blockade Venetian realities: her gondolier and the people she sees
along the streets and the canals become, from her perspective, tableaux vivants. Against her
descriptions of the homeless, these tableaux vivants are painful to read, because they suggest—at
least at first glance—that she resisted seeing Venetian people as people. That Effie Ruskin sees
present-tense Venetians as Tintorettoesque, Veronesesque and Giorgionesque figures is, for
some readers, perverse. It suggests that she is an unthinking, unfeeling Grand Tourist, who relies
on old-fashioned turns of phrases in order to describe her contemporary experiences.203
203
For James’s treatment of the gondolier see “Venice” (1882), “The Grand Canal” (1892); “Venice: An Early
Impression” (1872), and “Two Old Houses and Three Young Women” (1899), all of which are included in Italian
Hours. For a thorough discussion of James’s treatment of the gondolier, see especially Tamara Follini.
292
Indeed, the 19 November letter shows how Effie Ruskin has internalized the Grand
Tourist penchant for understanding the city through painterly colors, tropes, and signatures. To
be sure, it is a legitimizing pose: through her in situ accounts, she proves she can apply an
appreciation of Giogionesque color to outward-looking descriptions of real-life men, women,
and children. Her distraction—the uncomfortable elisions between paintings and real people on
the streets and the canals—is a mark of status. Yet for some readers, these descriptions are filled
with a self-consciously naïve nostalgia and demonstrate a willful taste for ahistoricity. Barolini
contends that this legitimizing posture places Effie Ruskin in the company “of the American
tourists Van Wyck Brooks depicted in his Dream of Arcadia,” much more, perhaps, than the
English tourists who read John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, less than a decade later” (644).
Effie Ruskin and these American tourists “went to Italy to see the art and picturesque attitudes of
peasants and to keep well removed from the life and passions about them, viewing the scene as
through a glass rosily” (649). This Arcadian worldview is dangerous, as Barolini argues, since
Anglo-American Italophiles often “didn’t see, didn’t care, whether Italy itself were dead or
alive” because their nostalgia privileged the past over the present (644). As we’ll see in chapter
six with The Princess Casamassima (1886), Henry James famously mocks this tendency for
tourists to see Venetians in terms of Tintoretto’s, Veronese’s, or Giorgione’s painterly
signatures. Critics who have studied James’s Italian Hours (1909) argue that this trope shows
how the narrators of the essays—in the style of the mid-nineteenth-century tourists he
critiques—resist seeing people as people.204
204
In “Venice: An Early Impression,” James (or the Jamesian narrator, who often satirizes mid-nineteenth-century
travel mores) compares the naked, starving children he sees at Torcello to savages and to cannibals; but their
distended bellies also remind him of cherubs in a Correggio painting. For a thorough discussion of James’s
treatment of Venetians as Correggios, see especially Christopher Stuart.
293
Yet by imagining an anonymous gondolier in Giorgionesque umber, Effie Ruskin makes
the unhistoric man historic. Indeed, her letter subtly traces continuities between fifteenth-century
Venice and nineteenth-century Venice—between the old Venetian Republic and the new, and
short-lived Venetian Republic—that may be hard to discern among the shelled railways and
bridges and the occupied piazzas. Effie Ruskin didn’t see Venice as Arcadia. Rather, her
interest in superimposing the Tintorettos, the Veroneses, and the Giorgiones upon present-tense
people shows how she reckons her Arcadian expectations with mid-nineteenth-century realities.
That she describes un-picturesque things—the “creature” who sells cigars in the piazzas—with
picturesque words shows how jolting contemporary life was against the gilded chambers and
hallways of the Doge’s Palace. These letters undoubtedly elide fifteenth- and nineteenth-century
iconographies, but they aren’t just naïve exercises in nostalgia. Effie Ruskin’s non-descriptions
of the Tintorettos and the Veroneses—and her vision of Giorgionesque umber on flesh-andblood people—may be grounded in real historical circumstances. For as Lutyens’s research of
1850s travelogues attests, many paintings were removed from the Doge’s Palace in 1848:
“[Edmund] Flagg wrote that to preclude the possibility of Austrian shells damaging the pictures
in the great hall of the Doge’s Palace, they were taken down in 1848 ‘and, two years later, had
not been replaced’” (72). Still, it’s clear Effie Ruskin “saw the Paradiso, one of the pictures
particularly mentioned by Flagg as having been removed” (72). In place of seeing Tintoretto’s
and Veronese’s paintings inside the Doge’s Palace, Effie Ruskin imagines seeing these paintings
as apparitions in the streets and the canals, reminding us, perhaps, of their absence from the
Doge’s Palace between 1848 and 1850.
November 1849 must have been a loaded time to tour the Doge’s Palace, since this
building had been a monument to the Republic of Venice for over four centuries. For if the
294
Doge was the symbolic figurehead for the Republic, then the Palace was the symbolic capitol for
Venetians’ civic assemblies from 1309 to 1797. In the wake of Napoleonic occupation, the
chambers that housed these assemblies became a museum. Indeed, the Doge’s Palace was still a
monument to the Republic of Venice, a monument to the old nation-state, but also, perhaps, a
monument to a new-found, if stultified, desire for independence. This is, perhaps, the reason
Venetians feared the Doge’s Palace would be shelled in the first place: it would have been a
symbolic destruction of their former independence. By the mid-nineteenth century, meanings of
works like Veronese’s The Triumph (or The Apotheosis) of Venice must have changed, for the
palace was no longer a capitol as much as it was an historical or an art historical archive under
French and then under Austrian control. Far from being prophetic histories for the present or the
future to come, then, these Renaissance paintings must have seemed like elegies for an
eighteenth- or nineteenth-century past Tintoretto and Veronese never even imagined.
John and Effie Ruskin must have noticed the absence of the Tintorettos and the
Veroneses in the empty spaces on the walls, and these empty spaces within the Gothic chambers
and hallways were palpable, if haunting, reminders of the 1848 revolution and the 1849
bombardment: the missing secular histories of Venice from the fourteenth and the fifteenth
centuries materialized, in many ways, the fragile state John and Effie Ruskin witnessed during
the fall of 1849. Indeed, if the Tintorettoesque and the Veronesesque faces Effie Ruskin
imagines seeing outside the palace remind us of the differences between fifteenth-century Venice
and nineteenth-century Venice, then they also suggest the important ways she is haunted by this
city’s tremendous past: contemporary people are contemporary people from her perspective, but
they're also specters of a past that was being protected and secreted out of her view. As we saw
in chapter four, the characters in Vernon Lee’s ghost stories are often haunted by Renaissance
295
painters and singers; likewise, Effie Ruskin is inspired by the figures she may or may not have
seen in the Doge’s Palace. Their specterly presence haunts her along the streets and the canals,
just as Sora Lena’s face haunts Madame Krasinska. Effie Ruskin may be a Madame Krasinska,
then, insofar as she renders the gondolier a Giorgione or the men and women Tintorettos and
Veroneses, but this vision of Venice as a tableau vivant is fleeting.
Her face-to-face encounters with Venetian people led to a much more personal
understanding of post-revolution, post-bombardment ghosts. She continues to see the economic
and the aesthetic impact of the war on Venetian families but also realizes that this period was
marked by painful human losses invisible to tourists who maintained a safe distance from the
men, women, and children who populated the city year-round. At the same time, she realizes
that this period of diminished tourism had devastating consequences for Venetian people. In a
letter to her mother dated 3 December 1849, Effie Ruskin describes a bittersweet moment when
she and John purchase lace from a poor Venetian woman. Interestingly, Effie Ruskin admits that
she wasn’t particularly interested in the lace itself but felt bad for this woman, who was
struggling to support herself, her son, and her son’s family in the wake of the revolution. “I was
more inclined to buy” the lace from the woman, she writes, because now that “the English
[aren’t] here many poor people’s living has been entirely cut off, for two years this poor woman
amongst the number, and with these riches in her possession she has been actually starving. Her
son who could have supported her was forced into the conscription and taken away, leaving his
wife and two infants dependent on her” (82). This anecdote shows how Effie Ruskin was moved
by the woman selling the lace, not just by the souvenir’s beauty. She mentions the lace in
passing, yet she details the stories that motivated the sale in the first place. Her purchase may be
read as a real-life parallel to Madame Krasinska’s purchase of the sketch-mask, for just as the
296
sketch-mask is an effigy for Sora Lena and for Sora Lena’s dead sons, the lace the woman sells
is fraught with the history of her son’s conscription but also with her son’s death. It’s almost as
if she suggests that the value of the lace inheres in interwoven personal and political histories she
narrates when she describes the woman and her son, not in the thing itself.
Still, her portrait of the woman encapsulates the condescending tone she’s taken toward
Veronese and Venetian people in earlier letters to her mother and father. By dwelling on the
circumstances surrounding the woman’s poverty, she implies that her purchase is an act of
charity as much as it is an act of mid-nineteenth-century tourism (Venetian lace was, after all, the
quintessential Venetian souvenir).205 Effie Ruskin’s tone is undeniably proud, and she pairs her
self-aggrandizing anecdote with stereotypes about Italians. From her perspective, the woman
from whom she purchases the lace embodies the 1848–1849 economic and political crises, and
she sees the woman as a victim of Italians’ pitiable ambivalence: “The Italians are very selfish
and I suppose all were too miserable to give her any money on her lace. She supplicated us with
tears in her eyes to take it, and she would give it us at any loss as she must have the money. We
agreed for the sum given when we were all contented” (82). Yet Effie Ruskin masks her selfcongratulatory tone by suggesting that this woman calls the purchase a blessing: “She looked at
John and pointing to me asked earnestly if he knew when any more of these ‘Benedette anime’
(blessed souls) would come, for she continually prayed for them. She gave us a thousand
blessings and it was most amusing to see her pantomime gestures when John said that the golden
Napoleons which are 16/- were better than the paper money of Venice” (82). “Poor creature,”
Effie Ruskin concludes, “it was a great pleasure to make her so happy and it is delightful to be
205
For Effie Ruskin’s letters about Murano glass, see chapter six.
297
able to make some of these miserable beings here happy by the power of money” (82).206 Effie
Ruskin’s meditation on the lace and the woman likely affected her mother and father
equivocally: it complements the other letters because it is a much more personal account of the
poverty she’s witnessed during her first two weeks in Venice, but it’s about Effie Ruskin’s
character as much as it is about the woman’s personal and political history.
Like the other letters, this anecdote transcends the catalogue-style descriptions she
attributes to her companions, John, Hobbs, and Ker. Her description of the lace updates
conventional accounts of mid-nineteenth-century leisure. She isn’t shopping from the turnstile
booths near St. Mark’s Square, and the value of the lace is decidedly intangible: it materializes
her human interest in the woman, and it shows how she figures herself self-consciously as an
English Samaritan. Indeed, this letter is the first time when she singles out one of the many poor
men and women she’s described from a distance throughout her time in Milan, Verona, and
Venice. Here, she imagines how her purchase affects the very people who she saw burning the
Moneta Patriottica just two weeks earlier. At the same time, however, it’s possible Effie
Ruskin’s realized that this kind of face-to-face interaction with poor Venetian people might
soften the extravagance her parents, or John’s parents, believed she was indulging. By
representing the lace purchase as Christian charity, and by pitting her distinctively English
benevolence against Italians’ ambivalence, she tempers what may otherwise be understood as a
period of self-indulgence in the war-torn region.
206
Cooper writes that this lace was a gift from Effie Millais to her daughter Alice Sophia Caroline (Carrie) StuartWortley nearly twenty years later. When Carrie Millais married the diplomat Charles Stuart-Wortley in January
1886, she “wore diamonds and duchesse satin, trimmed with antique Venetian lace” (Cooper 198). “The lace was
Effie’s gift to Carrie. She had kept it safe for thirty years, a souvenir of her visits to Venice with John Ruskin”
(198). “When she passed the lace on to her daughter,” Cooper continues, “it would take on other meanings,
becoming a tangible symbol of the threads of kinship that Effie was trying to hold together” (198).
298
Effie Ruskin’s letter about the lace-seller isn’t an anomaly: a week and a half later, she
tells her mother about a “dreadful event” Hobbs witnessed that reminds them all of just how
tense Austro-Italian relations were as late as 15 December 1849 (87). Before actually describing
the “dreadful event,” she reminds her mother that this city had changed hands from the Austrians
to the Italians in 1848 when Manin declared the Republic and was now under martial law. She
narrates a story about a man who lost his position at the Venetian Arsenal in the wake of these
mid-nineteenth-century repartitions within this broad historical panorama:
At the time the Austrians again took possession of the town and were changing
various situations and giving them to their own inferiors, they turned out of the
Arsenal a man, an Italian, who had worked there for 26 years, promising that
when things were settled they would give him another situation, but the time
passed on and his family and himself were reduced to extreme distress and then to
absolute starvation notwithstanding his many demands for employment. (87)
Once she outlines the economic and the political backdrop for the man’s personal crisis, her
letter assumes a much more familiar tone. While her references to the 1848 revolution and the
1849 bombardment seem unnecessary (the Grays were well aware of the violence that had
prevented the Ruskins’ honeymoon), this gloss is significant, for it shows how the story about
the man is, from Effie Ruskin’s perspective, one of many narratives defining the period. By
framing the “dreadful event” George witnessed on 14 December against her summary of Venice
from 1848 to 1849, she suggests that this secondhand news about an anonymous Italian man isn’t
just entertaining prattle among the expatriate community. Read in succession, her accounts of
the man and the lace-selling woman—framed within these sweeping historiographic asides—
suggest she wrote her mother and father with a journalistic scope in mind.
299
Still, though Effie Ruskin never meets the man face-to-face—she’s just heard about him
from Hobbs—her letter conveys a disturbing sense of immediacy:
Yesterday it appears he left home saying that if he did not get something from
them today they would hear of him. He got admittance to the Commandant of the
Arsenal who was sitting in his room with another officer at work. The Italian
asked for the promised work in such a peremptory tone that the Commandant said
unless he used more temperate language he should have none. The Italian rushed
at him with a Stiletto and stabbed him to the heart. He died instantly. The other
Officer cried out and ran to the wall for a sabre that was hanging. In the
meantime he received a thrust which it is feared is mortal, at least they did not
know last night whether he was dead or alive, and then the man killed himself. So
ended the dreadful Tragedy. One dare not blame the Italian, his provocation and
distress and peculiar religious notions probably brought him to think his sin small.
Perhaps the Commandant & his companion had never seen or heard of the man
before & did not know he had suffered so deeply, but it is all very dreadful and I
fear very Italian. (87–88)
It’s clear Effie Ruskin is moved by this man, just as she was moved by the woman who sold her
the lace: she realizes that violence wasn’t yet entirely in the past. In fact, she writes the letter in
installments, updating her mother about the officer in a postscript dated 18 December. “I asked
for the wounded Officer this morning,” she continues, “and hear that having had his arm
amputated at the shoulder it is hoped he will recover….” (89). Yet the two-part letter from the
15th and the 18th is striking not only because Effie Ruskin sympathizes both with the Italian and
the Austrian officer but also because it shows how she updates her mother about a “dreadful
300
event” she didn’t even witness herself. Her epistolary narrative is especially interesting, then,
because it shows how she realized her proximity to ongoing post-revolution, post-bombardment
violence. While she may have been kept at a polite distance from this violence, it’s clear she
understood that she was witnessing the unfolding consequences of a war that wasn’t yet
resolved. For if the lace-seller’s son reminds Effie Ruskin that this war rendered families sonless or father-less, the Arsenal incident shows how the Venetian and the Austrian men who
survive had to contend with the recent past in equally painful ways.
These anecdotes about the lace-selling woman and the conflict between the Italian and
the Austrian officer are humanizing, because they reveal just how sensitive Effie Ruskin was to
events outside her home with John, Ker, and Hobbs. Her outward-looking, secondhand reports
not only suggest her serious interests in Austro-Venetian relations; they also suggest just how
lonely she must have been. In fact, during November and December 1849, her letters about
foreign men and women she didn’t even personally know complement her much more informal
accounts of day-to-day events and replace parlayed chit-chat from the almost non-existent
Anglo-American expatriate community between November 1849 and March 1850. She was, in
many ways, isolated. While she was aware of the flight of Italians and of Anglo-Americans, she
was also sensitive to the crowdedness of Austrians throughout the city.207 The italianissimi, the
Veronese and the Venetian nobility (many of whom had funded the Moneta Patriottica), had fled
to the “Hills” between the springs of 1848 and 1849 and hadn’t yet returned. The austriacanti,
the Italian well-to-do who remained in the city because they didn’t sympathize with the
207
Effie Ruskin suggests the ways Austrian occupation affected where Italians and Anglo-Americans (especially
tourists) lived during this period. In fact, she describes Austrian quartering in a letter to her mother dated 3
December 1849: “Although there are 50 people living in the house here they are nearly all Austrians, Officers who
pay nothing for their rooms and always dine at a Restorateur’s. They bring a line from the Governor saying they are
to have such and such rooms and whoever is in them must turn out to make them comfortable. We were nearly
turned out by a General at Verona but he considerately took some other rooms. The poor Innkeepers have had them
in this way for the last 20 months and they are never paid a farthing. As long as the country is in a state of siege
they say they can do this and Italy remains so” (79).
301
republican cause (and were protected, economically and politically from its aftermath), couldn’t
receive her, since she hadn’t yet been presented to the Queen.208
Rawdon Brown was, however, one of the few expatriate fixtures who remained in Venice
from 1833 to 1883. He is often of interest to John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers since he
remained close with both of them long after their annulment, unlike many of their friends, who
chose one over the other. Brown is a crucial figure in histories of Victorian Italophiles, because
his tenure in Venice spans fifty years: during his life in Venice, he befriended writers as various
as John Ruskin, Henry James, and Robert Browning. Brown is known now for helping people,
including Effie Ruskin, find places within Venetian social circles. Yet he was also, like the
expatriate writers he befriended, a student of Anglo-Venetian history. In fact, he completed a
work on Venetian ambassadors to England for the British government, and he devoted twenty
years to this project. Brown wrote Effie Ruskin introductions to respectable Anglo- and AustroItalian circles during her first stay, and she mentions him in many of her letters home. It’s clear
that Effie Ruskin grew to understand her non-placement among the italianissimi and the
austriacanti, as well as the politicoaesthetic significance of the missing expatriate population on
the city’s future. In a letter to her mother dated 22 December 1849 she writes that Rawdon
Brown “says there will be no visiting this winter as the Italian families won’t come back which
he is very angry at, and we hear it is not on account of the Austrians at all, but they are kept in a
208
For fuller discussions of the italianissimi, the austriacanti, and Anglo-American expatriates, see Alexander,
Hibbert, Daly, Hilton, Barolini, Plant, Norwich, Hunt, Williams, and Cooper. Hilton reminds us that Effie Ruskin
“was never to see the many festivals and holidays that commemorated Venice’s proud past: the Austrians had
suppressed them. The English party, since they sided with the Austrians, necessarily had a foreigner’s view of the
city’s life, and hardly a sympathetic one. They were cut off from the proud Venetian nobility, except the
collaborators, and also from most intellectuals. Effie now learnt the differences between the italianissimi, the
patriots, and the austriacanti, Italians with Austrian politics. She saw how they never mixed, never went to the same
social occasions, frequented different cafés. She learnt that the Austrian band in St Mark’s Square was a symbol of
Austrian supremacy: that was why all patriots left the square as soon as it started to play” (141). For records of
Rawdon Brown’s friendships with John and Effie Ruskin, see especially chapters four and five of Norwich’s The
Paradise of Cities.
302
sort of fear by what the Republican party would say in Venice and it is a want of moral courage
on their part. The losses of the Venetian nobles has [sic] been much exaggerated and as they
have all fine places in the country they prefer staying where they are” (91). By 1849, Brown had
been living in Venice for nearly two decades, and he was sensitive to the political temperament
of the period, both from Austrian perspectives and from Venetian perspectives.
Though it’s clear he knew Austrians and anti-republican Venetians well, he criticizes
nobility—both those who supported and those who hadn’t supported Manin—for leaving the city
during this difficult period. “Radetzky told a person the other day,” she writes, “and this is quite
true, that he should give dinners at Verona and if no one came his Officers should eat them. He
should also give Balls and if the Italian Ladies would not come his Officers should waltz
together” (91). Effie Ruskin’s letter captures Brown’s tempered understanding of Austro-Italian
relations, and her account also shows how he subtly guided her own familiarity with Austrians’,
Venetians’, and Anglo-Americans’ cosmopolitan interactions. These relationships were, it
seems, much more nuanced than she might have expected. Through her experiences in Milan, in
Verona, and in Venice, she realized that this city was populated differently than it had been just
two years before. There weren’t many tourists, especially women tourists, in the Veneto since
the Risorgimento began. Effie Ruskin’s friendship with Brown shows how she became
increasingly self-conscious about the Austrian officers and soldiers, not just because these men
gawked at her but also because their occupation changed what she saw when she toured these
cities.
Just as she toured Veronese fortifications with Wimpffen, she toured Venetian battle sites
with Brown. On 22 December 1849, she writes to her mother:
303
Mr Brown took us to a place we had never heard of being in Venice, the Botanical
Gardens close to where the Railway Bridge is. You will see the position from
being so exposed to the Austrian Lines several shells fell in the Gardens and we
saw one which had not exploded, 900 lbs. weight. The gardens are therefore not
in good order at present, but the glass houses were in beautiful order and well
worth seeing. Mr Brown used to go very often to this garden to view the siege
operations and had a kind of seat made for himself in one of the high trees, and
when the shot & shells were falling about, he took the best care of himself he
could, but it must have been a very dangerous pastime but he seemed to have seen
a great deal & got no harm. (93)209
The unexploded shell appears as a strange monument to the revolution and the bombardment,
since Austro-Venetian tensions hadn’t yet been resolved. Effie Ruskin’s description of Brown’s
bird’s eye view of the blockade, like her secondhand report of the Arsenal violence, shows how
she understood her political circumstances through a voyeuristic immediacy. In order to convey
her shock at seeing the unexploded shell, she describes Brown’s experiences during 1848 as if
they were both past- and present-tense and as if they were her own. While she introduces her
tour of the Botanical Gardens as if she were merely sightseeing off-the-beaten-path with Brown,
it’s clear they weren’t there to see the gardens themselves. Instead, they toured the abandoned
site so that she could envision the siege operations and the shells, which could have damaged this
209
In fact, right before describing the Botanical Gardens and the Railway Bridge, she tells her mother that she
hasn’t seen Wimpffen since arriving in Venice: “We looked in vain amongst the staff the other day for our friend
the Count [Wimpffen] but he must have been left behind at Verona. There is a rumour that Radetzky is going to
remove his headquarters here which would benefit Venice much and the people then perhaps would come back, but
at present the town is certainly not pleasant for the soldiery who really behave extremely well (91–92). Effie Ruskin
cites another example of recent violence between Austrians and Venetians that was incited by Radetzky’s presence
and the soldiers’ and the officers’ occupation in the city: “One man was stabbed the other day, his clothes stripped
off and thrown into a canal. The next day at Lido a soldier who had charge of some money was found stabbed in the
morning, and really such things are not pleasant to be happening every day” (92).
304
place. The Botanical Gardens are, from her perspective, which is filtered through his, a spectacle
of potential destruction averted. The unexploded shell reminded passersby of the devastating
revolution and bombardment and of imminent threats embodied by the Austrian officers and
soldiers who still occupied the city, and it became an anti-touristic landmark in a space
Venetians, Austrians, and Anglo-American tourists had frequented together before. Effie Ruskin
wasn’t the only Venetian tourist to be fascinated with this bomb. In her 1966 preface to Effie in
Venice, Lutyens quotes a letter from a reader named V. S. Dawkins, whose “husband’s
grandfather” was the Consul to Venice in 1848. Dawkins claims she has the cannonball Effie
Ruskin describes “mounted on an oak stand” in her house (x–xi). The fortifications and
unexploded shells Effie Ruskin saw with Wimpffen and with Brown were reminders of a not-sodistant past—and reminders that this not-yet-unified country’s future was still uncertain.
Her most moving tour of Austrian fortifications and battle sites were, however, not with
Wimpffen or with Brown but with First Lieutenant Charles Paulizza.210 She toured San Giuliano
with Paulizza the first week of February 1850. San Giuliano was the island from which Austrian
officers and soldiers launched their air-balloon raid on Venice, and Paulizza was the lieutenant
who designed the campaign. Effie Ruskin confesses to her mother that this tour deeply affected
her understanding of post-war life in the city for Venetians and for Austrians alike. She writes,
“Yesterday we were taken by Paulizza to the Island of St. Giuliano from which place he threw all
the Bombs into Venice. I never in reading realized what War could do till we saw this place
which you will see is very important as commanding one side of Venice” (132). The San
Giuliano tour was undoubtedly a turning point for Effie Ruskin, who details her friendship with
210
Effie Ruskin first mentions Charles Paulizza in a letter to her mother dated 30 December 1849: “Such manners
are so different from ours at home and it just shows us how very badly conducted the Italians, both Ladies &
gentlemen, are. The Austrians are never so rude nor do they annoy us so much. We have not seen ‘Paulitzka’ for
nearly a week. I do not know what he is about but I imagine he is learning English and the next time we see him he
will indulge us with what he has committed to memory” (100).
305
Paulizza most fully in this undated letter. While John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers often
dismiss the Paulizza friendship as mere flirtation, this letter, coupled with the letter dated 30
November 1851 (in which she says she could “write a book about the Austrians”) demonstrates
that her Venetian experiences were shaped by the presence of officers and soldiers in meaningful
ways. For as Cooper attests, “the ugliness of the war finally came into focus for Effie” during
her tour of San Giuliano and in the letters she wrote to her family during the first and the second
weeks of February (64). Just as seeing the unexploded shell with Brown seems to have brought
1848 and 1849 into sharp focus to her, her tour of San Giuliano with Paulizza served as a
reminder that this war was still affecting Austrians and Venetians across the city.
Effie Ruskin’s detailed account of San Giuliano is gruesome in many ways. She is
clearly haunted by the damage still visible from August 1849. Her letter about San Giuliano, in
fact, shows how the damage extended from the shelled railway bridges and buildings to the
shelled houses, and even to human remains: “Seven months has scarcely elapsed since a nice
house stood there and a beautiful garden full of trees and flowers; now one sees four sentry
boxes and pools of water frozen over earth embankments, shot, cannon and, I suppose, mens’
bones lying about, a most perfect picture of desolation everywhere but still interesting” (132).
When she pauses to remind herself that this blockade had gripped the city as late as August,
when she was still travelling from London to Chamonix, she realizes how strange it is for her to
be in Venice in the first place. While Effie and John Ruskin were passing through Chamonix,
where Italians had surrendered long ago, Venice was still enduring the air-balloon raids that lead
to its ultimate, if comparatively delayed, armistice.
306
Yet as aware as she may have been of the damage she saw in Milan, in Verona, and in
Venice, she was even more shocked by the pain she realized the Austrian officers and soldiers
suffered during the sustained bombardment. These men, she continues,
were there for three months without ever leaving it or lying in a bed; often 24
hours without food and constantly some falling by the shot from the enemies’
batteries. Some of them had no shoes, he amongst the rest, and at last they were
so swollen that he could hardly stand. Fortunately it was summer or else many
more would have died, but as it was, 700 did on that little piece of ground. Their
powder magazine also caught fire and blew up & killed a great number. (132)
This is one of the most poignant letters Effie Ruskin sent to her mother and father, in part
because it shows how surprised she was by what she saw in the months following the armistice.
While it may be easy to criticize her for being so shocked, and for confessing twofold, and often
confused, empathies with Venetians and with Austrians, or for aligning herself naïvely with one
and then with the other, we should be much more careful. For if we read her allegiances as
equivocating, then it may be easier to understand why she was so shocked by San Giuliano.
When Effie Ruskin saw impoverished Venetians eating and sleeping under the shelled bridges
and burning money in the square, it was horrifying; her experiences in Milan and in Verona (and
the newspapers circulating across Europe) had been but tepid precursors. When she saw the
bones of dead Austrian officers and soldiers, however, she must have realized that there were
human tragedies on both sides, and she would be haunted by these images as much as she was by
the lace-seller’s son and the disaffected arsenal worker who she never met in person.
Still, the parts of this letter that are most often quoted by John and Effie Ruskin’s
biographers highlight her personal—not her political—interests in Paulizza for their suggestive
307
content. Today, Paulizza is rarely remembered, even by Risorgimento historians, except in
relation to John and Effie Ruskin, despite his crucial role in the air-balloon raids. He was
quickly villainized by the Ruskins and the Grays alike, because everyone was worried about
what people in Perth and in London might assume about his intentions with Effie, especially
given her already difficult relationship with John.211 John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers have,
it seems, taken their cues from the family’s apprehensions, and when they describe Paulizza,
they often render him a war hero without mentioning the war. The same critics who are quick to
dismiss Effie Ruskin as unthinking, unfeeling, or apolitical by discussing her empathy with the
Austrian officers and soldiers out of context and by suggesting that her allegiances were merely
one-sided, often scrutinize the intimate details of her time with Paulizza with a much more
discerning eye.212 Hilton goes as far as suggesting that this flirtation would have been much
211
For discussions of Paulizza’s friendship with John and Effie Ruskin, see Guiton, Rose, Hibbert, Daly, Lloyd,
Bullen, Batchelor, Barolini, Hilton, Plant, Norwich, Hunt, Moyle, Cooper; see also Jackson and O’Gorman. While
John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers both intimate that this friendship appeared illicit to everybody in Perth, in
London, and in Venice, her biographers are often less damning than his. Hilton is among the most damning:
“Effie’s position was plain. But she knew what gossip was like, and she knew more about Perth gossip than
Venetian gossip. She asked Charlotte not to mention her friendship with Paulizza in her letters home” (146). For
discussions of Mr. and Mrs. Gray’s, George Gray’s, and Rawdon Brown’s concerns about Paulizza, see Rose, Daly,
Lloyd, Bullen, Batchelor, Hilton, Moyle, Cooper, and Williams. Bullen’s portrait shows how Effie Ruskin was
inundated with concerns both from the Ruskins and from the Grays as well as her Venetian companions: “Effie’s
attitude was deeply hypocritical. She defended herself by telling her mother that technically, at least, she had
behaved honourably, but her liaison with Paulizza was so blatant that Ruskin accused her of coquetry, the Ruskins’
close friend in Venice, Rawdon Brown, upbraided her with accusations in ‘the gravest colours.’ And even her
brother George in Scotland pointed out that she was compromising herself” (514). Yet Cooper suggests that the
most damning rumors about this period developed as late as the 1860s and the 1870s, long after the Ruskin marriage
had been annulled: “Many years later Effie’s brother George alleged that John had deliberately tried to compromise
his wife’s reputation. John’s attitude to Effie’s relationship with Paulizza certainly can be read in these terms. Effie
herself confided to her mother that John needed a wife who could take care of her own character. He appeared
oblivious to the awkward situations he put her in” (65).
212
Guiton, Rose, and Daly were among the earliest biographers to sensationalize Effie Ruskin’s interest in Paulizza;
John Ruskin’s biographers have followed suit. For readings that emphasize Paulizza’s (sexual) interest in Effie, and
Effie’s (sexual) interest in Paulizza, see Rose, Guiton, Daly, Hibbert, Bullen, Batchelor, Hilton, Norwich, Hunt,
Moyle, Cooper, and Williams. “The situation,” Rose contends, “as everyone but Effie saw, was perfect for
‘intrigue’: the neglected wife in a foreign country, the handsome, devoted officer, also far from home. But as far as
Effie was concerned, such impropriety was only for Italians and bad novels” (79). “Still untouched herself,” Daly
imagines, “Effie delighted in Paulizza’s delicate attentions and blinded herself to the pain his hopeless love caused
him. John was not only undisturbed by the other man’s interest, he told his wife that he respected her more because
a man as cultured as Paulizza liked her” (146). Since Rose and Daly published these speculations, many have
interpreted them as facts that are supported by the letters she wrote her mother, and they blame her as often as they
308
more serious had Effie not been married. In fact, he terms her correspondence with her family
“frank” and argues that “she might have loved this man” had she not loved her husband so dearly
(145). When other biographers recount Effie Ruskin’s horror at seeing the bones of dead
Austrian officers and soldiers, they often intimate that this shock was fleeting for her because she
was truly there to be with Paulizza.
To be sure, Effie Ruskin’s letter reveals that Paulizza doted on her throughout the day,
and that this intimacy probably wasn’t unusual. Effie Ruskin’s letters make clear that by the first
and the second weeks of February, she and her husband were so comfortable with Paulizza that
he became a fixture in their domestic lives: he breakfasts with them, he introduces them to
doctors/friars who treat her headaches, and he escorts Effie to dinners John won’t attend. For
example, in from a letter to her mother dated 9 February 1850, she writes,
The last Ball went off with much greater éclat than the former and we enjoyed [it]
much more. John stayed & was much amused till twelve o’clock and he &
Paulizza stood together and made remarks. With the latter who brought us home
about three I did not dance at all. He was not well with his head. He has never
been well since he was wounded with the Bomb at St. Giuliano and has fears for
his sight which would be dreadful; his eyes are so exquisitely beautiful and so
clear & bright that it does not look well, and then men are so stupid; the Doctor
tells him he should do nothing, and he is so clever and so full of genius that he is
inventing and drawing and studying till all the hours of the night and then he
cannot sleep at all. (136)
blame Paulizza. “Effie could be so innocently open about her feelings because she was very young,” Batchelor
attests, “completely without sexual experience and as yet devoted to her husband. Whether Paulizza saw her as
sexually available is anybody’s guess. Certainly, he missed no opportunity to be with Effie. Her illness enabled
him to touch her and to offer amateur medical treatment which she had the good sense to resist” (88).
309
Even as Effie Ruskin describes this glamorous event to her mother, she seems much more
concerned about what happened to Paulizza’s eyes at San Giuliano, where they’d just been, than
she is about relaying the tittle-tattle from the night. Like the letters from Santa Maria delle
Grazie and from the Doge’s Palace, this letter shows how Effie Ruskin was again reconciling her
safeguarded, interior world with events that had taken place during the period just before she
arrived in the city. While John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers often focus attention on how
handsome he was (“his eyes are so exquisitely beautiful”), a fact that clearly wasn’t lost on her,
she seems to be haunted, here, by the pain she can see in his glassy eyes, for they undoubtedly
reminded her of the physical and the psychological pain he secreted in the wake of the
bombardment.213
It’s clear, then, and not surprising, that Paulizza felt protective over Effie when they
travelled from Venice to San Giuliano one week earlier. In fact, she reassures her mother that
after seeing the remains of the year-long bombardment—in the cold—Paulizza tends to her
comfort: “The day was lovely but cold, although in the sun it was quite delicious, but Paulizza
declared it would be cold sailing so long, even though shut up, and would not go away without a
hot bottle under his grey cloak for my use” (133). “He is always at John for allowing me to sit
over the fire,” she continues, “but highly approves of the bottle which I thought you would
highly approve of; but I suppose George would have considered the five hours spent in speaking
213
Tellingly, Batchelor dismisses Paulizza’s involvement in the blockade, rendering him, his work, and his battle
wounds a parenthetical: “(These bombs were not without hazard to their creator: an adverse wind caused a number
of them to blow on to an island held by Paulizza himself and his men.)” (87). For representative discussions of
Paulizza’s air raid (in conversation with John and Effie Ruskin and with Rawdon Brown), see Guiton, Rose,
Batchelor, Barolini, Hilton, Plant, Moyle, Cooper, and Williams. Guiton addresses Paulizza in greatest detail: “One
of the siege operations which Rawdon Brown was most anxious to observe was the innovation of flying bombs
attached to balloons which were floated over Venice and timed to explode over their targets. They were not a
tremendous success and one created fearful havoc in the lagoon island from which they were launched by exploding
while it was being made ready for launching. But the interest here is that they were invented and made by one of
Effie’s most devoted escorts during her stay in Venice, First Lieutenant Charles Paulizza of the Artillery. So
Venetian resistance figured in their lives through the rash act of an English friend and the flying bombs of an
Austrian officer” (64).
310
German & sailing in a Gondola improper and dangerous in the last degree, but seriously don’t let
George be angry because we are in so talented a person’s company” (133). Effie Ruskin may
have been self-conscious about their shared affection for one another, since she stopped writing
her family about Paulizza shortly thereafter (and instructed Ker to do the same). Even
biographers as sympathetic as Cooper to Effie’s perspective have had a difficult time reconciling
Paulizza’s personal and political lives, given her detailed letters home: “It was hard to imagine
the softly spoken officer, who so thoughtfully provided Effie with a hot-water bottle for the
gondola ride, clambering over the broken bodies of his comrades and ordering his cannons to be
directed against the great Piazza. Perhaps that was the reason he sometimes seemed melancholy.
For Effie, his complexity made him undeniably romantic” (64). Yet as “romantic” as Paulizza
may have seemed to the Ruskins and the Grays (or to contemporary readers), she didn’t reduce
him to a dark stereotype. Far from portraying him merely as a romantic or romanticized suitor,
her letters suggest that she comes to respect him deeply because his often unglamorous war-time
experiences make him a honorable person in her eyes.
One of the reasons why biographers often argue that Effie Ruskin was apolitical or that
she empathized simply with Italians (during October 1849) or simply with Austrians (from
November 1849 to March 1850) is her coy tone. In her letters to her mother and father during
February and March 1850, she equivocates about what she did and didn’t know about Paulizza.
For instance, in the letter about her tour of San Giuliano, she writes that Paulizza
did something against Venice very wonderful with Balloons but I could not
exactly understand what, but tell George that John is perfectly satisfied with my
conduct in every particular and is kinder to me & fonder of me every day, and
when I find a good husband I hope I know his value properly and appreciate him
311
enough. John is particularly flattered with the attention they pay me, and when I
go out would give me any thing I liked if he thought it would make me look
better. (133–134)
Many of John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers have suggested that this letter shows how willfully
oblivious she was to what she saw during her stays in Venice, and they often point to it in order
to show how she coyly pits her husband and her friend against one another. To be sure, her
obliviousness, or her feigned obliviousness, is strange, especially since it’s clear she was moved
by Paulizza’s physical and psychological pain. Still, her vague reference to Paulizza’s
“something” may not be as pointed as biographers have suggested, for if we remember that this
letter was mailed from a twenty-one-year-old woman to her mother and father, then it’s easier,
perhaps, to understand why she equivocates. Effie Ruskin was likely self-conscious not only
about what other people in London and in Perth might say about her familiarity with Paulizza’s
personal and political past, but also of their provocative excursions. Indeed, throughout her
correspondence with her mother and father, she complains that Italian and Austrian men are
often crude in their attentions to her, but she has “much more respect for Paulizza because he is
so distinguished a man” (133). Even as she denies studied allegiances to his identity as a First
Lieutenant, then, she defends his character.
Many biographers parse the irony of the Paulizza friendship—and of John Ruskin’s
encouragement of the Paulizza friendship—given the men’s vastly different ties to the city. For
whether, as Effie Ruskin suggests, John respected Paulizza, or whether, as George Gray
suggests, John wanted Paulizza to seduce her, it is strange to think that this one woman could
have been so close to such different icons of mid-nineteenth-century Venice. It seems, from
Effie Ruskin’s correspondence, that the respect John and Paulizza felt for one another was
312
mutual. Yet the biocritical obsession with the Ruskin-Paulizza awkwardness is striking. Hunt
imagines that Paulizza’s “charm and chivalry was a welcome, refreshing antidote to [Ruskin’s]
usual habit of argumentative hectoring in polite society” (118). “In a lovely irony,” Hunt
continues, “it also transpired that it was Paulizza who, as First Lieutenant of the Austrian
Artillery, had been in charge of the shelling of Venice and its monuments during the siege.
Ruskin, rather nobly, didn’t seem to mind” (118–119). Yet if Hunt argues that John Ruskin was
oblivious to Paulizza’s involvement in the blockade, then Plant suggests that Effie was equally
oblivious: “Effie’s friendship with the Austrian Charles Paulizza, who had master-minded the
aerial bombardment of Venice, caused her no second thoughts: indeed she admired his ingenuity
and seemingly gave little thought to the danger to the stones to which her husband was so
devoted” (145–146). Both John and Effie Ruskin’s biographers have outlined how Paulizza’s
work must have been offensive to the author of The Stones of Venice. “Ruskin must have
summoned all his politeness when invited to admire Paulizza’s drawings,” Hilton writes, “which
appear to have been plans and diagrams for his attacks on the city: but he was glad to use his
influence to gain entrance to buildings under military occupation” (145). Cooper likewise notes
that this occupation undermined John Ruskin’s interests in Gothic Venice—and Paulizza came to
embody mid-nineteenth-century Austria from the couple’s perspective. The problem with this
metanarrative is that it underestimates the political meanings of Effie Ruskin’s friendship with
Paulizza in favor of a discussion of two important men in her life: her husband and her friend.
It’s clear Effie Ruskin understood Paulizza’s clout in Austrian and in Venetian circles
even before she toured San Giuliano. In a letter to her mother dated 27 January 1850, she
explains how she tried to advocate for her gondolier’s family through her connection to Paulizza:
313
My Gondolier’s brother has been marked in the conscription two or three days
ago and appointed to join Count Wimpffen’s regiment at Trieste directly. His
case like that of hundreds is very hard; they cannot be taken into the Gendarmerie
for fear of plots and this poor Giuseppe Parmo must leave his wife and family and
go and serve as a common soldier in Dalmatia. My Carlo came to me in a great
state of distress and begged me if I had any influence over the Austrian to speak
of his brother to him. I did, and discomposed Paulizza not a little. He twirled his
moustaches and looked very uneasy; he said, “You know (and I thought this in
Perth would sound so funny) that every thing you say is to me a command and
that I will occupy myself in whatever can promise you happiness, but in this thing
I have personally no power; I will write a petition to the Governor and try that,
but certainly it will be of no avail for if one is kept back, hundreds ask for the
same advantage and it is impossible in the present state of things to act
otherwise.” I saw he was quite right and told him not to put himself in a
disagreeable [word omitted] in any way, but he would do it and I hope for poor
Parmo’s sake that he may be successful, and from the peculiar way in which I first
became acquainted with Paulizza I shall not feel if he succeeds that I am under
any other obligation than thanking him for his trouble. (124–125)
It’s hard not to think that Effie Ruskin’s empathy with Carlo and with Paulizza in light of her
earlier experiences in Venice: the lace-seller, her son, and her son’s family, who were still
struggling to deal with the aftermath of his conscription; the bones of dead officers and soldiers
she saw at San Giuliano; and the homeless people who haunted her vision of mid-nineteenthcentury Venice. Effie Ruskin’s point, in fact, may not be whether Paulizza did or didn’t want to
314
help Carlo’s brother, but that this moment inspires in her friend, the First Lieutenant of the
Austrian Artillery, a familiar sense of ambivalence about what it means for Austrians and
Venetians to be civil to one another.
Paulizza died just one month (July) before John and Effie Ruskin returned to Venice
(September) in the fall of 1851. Though she knew that his eyesight had worsened and that his
headaches had become debilitating (she sent him pills from London as late as 1851), her letters
from this period reveal that his death was a painful shock. If readings of her first trip to Venice
interpret Effie Ruskin’s allegiances to Venetians and to Austrians as seemingly half-hearted (in
part because of Paulizza), then readings of her second catalogue her cosmopolitan friendships as
evidence of a much more sustained obliviousness to post-revolution, post-bombardment
poverty.214 Yet her understanding of Austrian occupation was much more nuanced than a
romantic desire to surround herself with Wimpffen, Paulizza, and Radetzky, even if they do
populate a number of the letters she wrote between September 1851 and June 1852. It’s clear
that by this period, people were much more resigned to Austria’s sustained control over the
214
For discussions of Effie Ruskin’s friendships with Austrian officers and soldiers, especially during her second
stay in Venice from 1851 to 1852, see Alexander, Hibbert, Daly, Hilton, Barolini, Plant, Norwich, Hunt, Williams,
and Cooper. For discussions of her admiration of Joseph Radetzky, see Hibbert, Daly, Plant, Hilton, Cooper. For
catalogues of the Austrian and the Venetian cosmopolites with whom she socialized, see Hibbert, Hilton, and
Moyle. Here’s are two representative lists. From Moyle: “It was not just the Venetians who were noticing Effie. It
was the Austrians too. In 1814 Venice had become part of the Austrian-held kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia. In the
year of revolutions, 1848, a revolt had briefly reestablished a Venetian republic, but by the end of August 1849, just
a few months before Effie and John’s sojourn there, the Austrians had laid siege to Venice, cutting off its supplies
and bombarding the lagoon, and had taken it again. Now the city was teeming with the officers of the victorious
army—and they were in high spirits. The attention paid to Effie by the Austrians is testified by a collection of their
calling cards, held with her letters in the archive at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. From this it is clear
that the Baronne de Wertzlar, Colonel Prince Troubetzkoi, Marshal Duc de Raguse and Lieutenant Wilhelm
Holxammer, among others, offered Mrs Ruskin their services” (67). From Hilton: “Effie loved Venetian society.
She mixed with the officers of the occupying forces and their ladies, with the austriacanti nobility and with the
visitors to Venice who moved in such circles. The very names that we find in her letters home are eloquent. There
was the Madame Taglioni who once owned the palace in which Rawdon Brown now lived, Count Wimpffen, the
Count and Countess Minischalchi, Baroness Hessler, the Countess Mocenigo and the Duc de Bordeaux. At a private
musical performance attended only by Italians she met Prince Joseph Giovanelli. At balls she talked to the Baroness
Wetzler, danced with the young officers Holzammer and Montig, but mostly with Prince Troubetzkoi, whom she
later decided not to see in London. She chatted to the Saxon consul Herr Becker, to the Baron Urmenyi, ‘my
handsome old friend who lives here in the hotel’, and to the Marquis Selvatico, the President of the Venetian
Academy” (143–144).
315
Veneto: the armistices weren’t as fresh as they had been when she first arrived in Milan, in
Verona, and in Venice two years before. Indeed, during her 1851–1852 stay, descriptions of
Venetians aren’t as frequent as they had once been, perhaps because she had earned the Queen’s
favor and was free to socialize with a different class of Austrians and Anglo-Americans. In a
letter to her mother dated 25 November 1851 she writes, “I could not be better placed for seeing
Austrian Society and I really admire them, so easily amused, so kind and goodtempered & so
eminently wellbred. I never am with them that I don’t feel myself brusque and awkward and
they are so different from the French who are so heartless with their politeness. But they like my
outspokeness & I make them laugh immensely” (220). By 1851, new waves of tourists were
starting to crowd Venice, the last generation to arrive without The Stones of Venice in hand;
these new not-so-grand tourists were learning to appreciate Venetians’ past in place of their notso-distant present. The uncertainty defining the years immediately following the revolution and
the bombardment may have dulled during Effie Ruskin’s second stay in Venice, but her sense of
ambivalence is as acute as it was when she first saw the city in November 1849. In a letter to her
mother dated 3 April 1852, she remembers the region she had grown to love as a country, even
as she remembers its Austrian occupation: “Poor Italy, what a pity it is that whenever any war is
to be gone through, her plains and Cities should be made into battlefields to finish the quarrels of
other nations” (289). For if Effie Ruskin was inspired during this second stay in Venice to write
a book about Austria, since “under that name all nations exist,” then she realized a book about
Austria must also be a book about Italy.
Yet the subtleties of Effie Ruskin’s allegiances to Austrians and to Venetians have been
lost on the whole. Critics’ reluctance to read her letters as important historical or literary
historical documents is two-fold: her marriage, her annulment, and her remarriage put her
316
credibility into question after the mid 1850s; and her correspondence reveals that she came to
understand Venetians and Austrians through equivocating empathies that likely make readers
uncomfortable. To be sure, nobody, including Effie Ruskin herself, fancied she was a
spokeswoman for Austrians, for Venetians, or for Anglo-American expatriates who travelled to
the city in the wake of 1848. Her letters were never meant for publication. She wasn’t as
conservative as her husband and his parents-in-law were during this period. She wasn’t,
moreover, the mouthpiece for democratic politics or democratic aesthetics that her husband
eventually became. While John Ruskin didn’t address the Risorgimento publicly during the
1840s and the 1850s, his private letters to his father demonstrate that he was opposed to the
revolutions he witnessed in Paris and, perhaps more powerfully, in Milan, in Verona, and in
Venice.215 In his letters to his father during this period, he confides that he is worried the
revolution and the bombardment endangered the integrity of his beloved Gothic architecture, and
he makes his support of Austrian government (over Venetian self-government) clear.216 Despite
his eventual support of unification by the 1860s, however, John Ruskin paid tribute to his
conservative politicoaesthetic inheritance as late as 1885. The opening line of Praeterita shows
how he continued to align his beliefs with his father’s: “I am, and my father was before me, a
violent Tory of the old school;—Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s. I name these
two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters”
(Praeterita 13).
215
For synopses of John Ruskin’s indifference (perhaps unexpected indifference) to the Risorgimento during the
1840s and the 1850s, see especially Nangle, Guiton, Batchelor, Barolini, Hilton, Michie, and Williams. For a
discussion of The Stones of Venice as a Risorgimento work, see David Barnes. For a fuller discussion of John
Ruskin’s evolving sympathies (with the Austrians in the 1840s and the 1850s and then with the Italians in the 1860s
and the 1870s), see especially Alexander’s Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and the Modern Temper. Alexander
shows how 1848 unsettled John Ruskin, for personal and for political reasons; yet he remained an anti-republican
thinker until long after his honeymoon and his annulment.
216
For representative letters, see Ruskin’s Letters from Venice 1851–1852, especially those written during
September and October 1851.
317
Just as biographers render Effie Mrs. Ruskin or Mrs. Millais, Admiral Sir William James
titled his chapter about the 1849–1850 sojourn “The Stones of Venice.” While “The Stones of
Venice” contains unpublished letters she wrote to her mother and father, it privileges letters
about Effie Ruskin circulated among the elder Ruskins, the elder Grays, and John over letters she
wrote herself. This is all the more ironic, however, since James writes in the dedication that this
book is meant to vindicate Effie Millais for her children, her grandchildren, and the family
members who didn’t live to defend her. Tellingly, Williams follows suit in her new biography of
Effie Ruskin/Millais: her chapter on the 1849–1850 sojourn is also titled The Stones of Venice.
Yet if we read Effie Ruskin’s letters not just as supplements to John’s or as documents to
historicize the period when he drafted The Stones of Venice, then we’ll discover a much more
ambivalent—and a much more humane—person than existing Victoriana intimates. This is
especially important since John and Effie Ruskin developed markedly different politicoaesthetic
allegiances, especially during their 1849–1850 stay.
Effie Ruskin’s wavering support for Austrians and for Venetians during her immediate
moment is, I argue, a different kind of ambivalence than John’s, since his shifting allegiances
developed slowly between the First and the Second/Third Wars of Italian Independence. Her
ambivalence wasn’t a gradual shift from conservatism to liberalism, it wasn’t watered-down
conservatism, and it isn’t a mark of the cruel indifference she’s often accused of.217 Perhaps
217
Even when biographers do consider Effie Ruskin’s opinions about Austrians and Venetians apart from John’s,
they oversimplify and then they villainize her allegiances to Wimpffen, to Paulizza, and even to Radetzky. In fact,
they often discuss what I’m calling ambivalence as coolness or as coldness, conflating her fickle, yet cool or cold
disposition with a much more sinister political apathy. “In the society in which she moved—enclosed, rich,
cosmopolitan, full of intrigue,” Hilton writes, “this could have been misunderstood. But Effie had cool feelings for
propriety” (143). “There was another side to Effie, too,” Barolini similarly writes, “the flighty one that the writer
Mrs. Gaskell was to recall from their school days together: ‘I don’t think she has any more serious faults than vanity
and cold heartedness. . . . She really is close to a charming character’” (637). Bullen’s portrait may be the most
damning, for he quotes Effie’s self-deprecating admission that she had “a perfect heart of ice”: “Mr Ruskin actually
admired her ‘coldness’ and her ‘superiority—to all the kissing and flattering nonsense of School Girls’, while during
Effie’s exploitation of the affection of the Austrian Paulizza in Venice, she herself confessed ‘I am a strange person
318
because she wasn’t as attached as John to inherited political dispositions, she was much more
affected by what she saw during her stays between 1849–1850 and 1851–1852. Effie Ruskin’s
ambivalence was, then, much more immediate than John’s gradual (and perhaps nostalgic)
movement from one end of the political spectrum to the other.
In fact, Effie Ruskin’s tempered treatment of Austrians and Venetians may be much more
representative of the mood of the period, which we’ve traced in our readings of Rome and of
Florence: Effie Ruskin’s Italy is, like Margaret Fuller’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, like George
Eliot’s and Henry James’s, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s, and like Vernon Lee’s, defined by
ambivalence.218 As we’ve seen in the introduction to this dissertation, Effie Ruskin’s responses
to Austro-Venetian tensions were prescient in many ways. Prevailing discussions of the United
Kingdom of Italy now suggest that this period of Risorgimento wasn’t a response to patriotism
among Italians as much as it was a result of Austrian, Prussian, and French control over the
region. Effie Ruskin’s correspondence is sensitive to these questions of imperial power, just as
the turn from the first and second halves of “Casa Guidi Windows” are and just as the
fluctuations in Fuller’s dispatches between 1848 and 1849 are.219 Like Effie Ruskin, Fuller and
and Charlotte [Ker] thinks I have a perfect heart of ice’. Speaking of the ‘character’ of the fallen Venice, Ruskin
used terms which were strikingly similar. ‘Venice stands’, he said, ‘like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable
. . . she calculated the glory of her conquests by their value . . . [and] at once broke her faith and betrayed her
religion’ (Works, ix. 24)” (512). It’s telling that Hilton, Barolini, Bullen, Gaskell, and Effie Ruskin herself turn to
this rhetoric of coolness/coldness, which resurfaces in characters’ descriptions of Hyacinth Robinson toward the end
of The Princess Casamassima (see chapter six). Still, Effie Ruskin’s ambivalent empathy with Venetians and with
Austrians shows how she, unlike John Ruskin, understood the city’s unfolding present and future histories as yet
unresolved.
218
Her interests in politics and in aesthetics differ from two other Italophile writers married to famous men and
considered in this dissertation: Sophia Hawthorne, who lived in Rome, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lived
in Florence. Effie Ruskin’s sightseeing is different from her husband’s, and equally different from Nathaniel and
Sophia Hawthorne’s sightseeing: she doesn’t tour Venice by moving from gallery to gallery. It may be more useful,
in fact, to compare Effie Ruskin to Barrett Browning and to Fuller. For though it may tempting to map Effie
Ruskin’s Venetian sojourns onto the Hawthorne marriage or the Browning marriage in order to suggest the Ruskins’
unhappiness (in Perth, in London, or in Venice), we should be careful to read her on her own, just as we would
Sophia Hawthorne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or even Margaret Fuller.
219
Hilton describes a meeting between Effie Ruskin and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the context of John’s work:
“There, in his old study, he worked all day on the second and third volumes of The Stones of Venice. It was to be a
book that scarcely resembles anything else in Victorian literature. Yet it has a literary context. Ruskin was now
319
Barrett Browning worry over impending collapses as much as they suggest that this new kind of
nation and nationalism is inevitable. Effie Ruskin’s letters aren’t battle cries for the republican
cause, her allegiances to Venetians and to Austrians aren’t mutually exclusive, and the lingering
ambivalence she expresses between 1849 and 1852 isn’t the product of her disillusionment with
the Pope (as Fuller’s and Barrett Browning’s largely were); however, she expresses a sense of
ambivalence we’ve seen in Fuller’s and in Barrett Browning’s work from this period. Indeed,
Effie Ruskin may be much more conservative than Fuller or Barrett Browning, though she
should still be read along a republican/anti-republican spectrum that doesn’t pit one side
exclusively against the other.
It’s all the more important to read Effie Ruskin’s politicoaesthetic sentiments alongside
Fuller’s and Barrett Browning’s, since she’s most often read against two fictional women who
are usually read as antitheses of one another: Dorothea Brooke and Rosamond Vincy.220 “The
plot” of the Ruskin marriage from John’s “point of view,” Rose contends, “weirdly pre-figures
(by some twenty years) the story of Lydgate and Rosamund [sic] Vincy in Middlemarch” (74).
For Rose, Effie is Rosamond Vincy and John is Tertius Lydgate: she is a “pretty face” and he is
a hard-working intellectual who “underestimates” marriage (74). Yet Rose suggests that this
novelistic parallel works equally well if Effie is Dorothea Brooke and John is Edward Casaubon.
For if we sympathize with Effie and not with John, it is “the story of an ardent, high-spirited
expanding his acquaintance among contemporary writers. Manning’s themes have a bearing on Ruskin’s epic
history. So have books by Carlyle. So also have a number of poems by Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Ruskin
first made Browning’s acquaintance at Coventry Patmore’s house at The Grove in Highbury. Effie was curious to
know what the Browning’s were like. She had no great interest in poetry. But she had noticed how Samuel Rogers,
always jealous of other poets, had abused Ruskin when he saw that he was reading Elizabeth Browning’s ‘Casa
Guido Windows’ [sic]. Mrs Browning did not appear at Highbury that night, but Ruskin got on rather well with her
husband. The talk was mostly of Italy. Ruskin had to acknowledge that, despite his liberal views, the poet knew
much about the country that he did not. A few days afterwards John and Effie went to call on the Brownings at their
lodgings in Welbeck Street. No record of the conversation remains. But it seems that Elizabeth Browning was not
inclined to be appreciative of Effie. She wrote to a friend, ‘Pretty she is and exquisitely dressed—that struck me—
but extraordinary beauty she has none at all, neither a feature or expression’” (175–176).
220
For readings of Effie Ruskin as Rosamond Vincy or as Dorothea Brooke, see Rose, Lloyd, and Williams.
320
woman who married an emotionally and sexually defective man” (74). Williams likewise uses
this parallel as a structural basis for her biography of the Gray-Ruskin-Millais “love triangle.”
She uses quotations from Middlemarch as epigraphs for each of her chapters; unlike Rose, who
considers both the Lydgate and the Casaubon marriages, Williams maps Effie Ruskin onto
Dorothea alone. In the epilogue to the biography, Williams discusses why the Casaubon and the
Ruskin marriages are and aren’t true parallels, noting that both couples honeymoon in Italy, the
Casaubons in Rome and the Ruskins in Venice. Beyond these similarities in “the plot” of the
Casaubon and the Ruskin marriages, however, Williams does note the factual connections
linking George Eliot to John Everett Millais and (possibly) to Effie Millais. “George Eliot knew
Millais and they respected one another’s work,” Williams writes; “he attended her funeral and in
1893 painted The Girlhood of St Theresa, based on the Prelude to Middlemarch. Her common
law husband, G. H. Lewes, wrote to him on 3rd April 1877 asking if she might visit his studio
privately, and other letters reveal that she met and called on him occasionally between then and
1880, the year of her death. We don’t know whether she ever met Effie” (189).
Even Williams concedes, however, that Effie Ruskin is not Rosamond or Dorothea, just
as John Ruskin isn’t Lydgate or Casaubon, and John Everett Millais isn’t Ladislaw. She’s not,
moreover, just Mrs. Ruskin or Mrs. Millais, and she’s not just the “Effie” of the plays, the films,
or the glossy BBC miniseries. Her pop-culture infamy from the mid-nineteenth century to the
present moment (two films about Effie Ruskin-Millais are in production now and set for release
by 2012 and 2013), shows how ready contemporary audiences are to fictionalize or to dramatize
Effie Ruskin/Milliais. This obsession with the literariness of her story is provocative, especially
since we know her story only up until a certain point and only filtered through other people’s
letters, biographies, and autobiographies. When we read Effie Ruskin in her own words, then,
321
it’s hard not to superimpose. Yet the “plot” of her Italian letters isn’t linear, despite our attempts
to read it that way, and her simultaneous empathies with Austrians and with Venetians don’t
follow the arc inscribed by her husband across his long public career. These comparisons (how
she is and isn’t John Ruskin, how she is and isn’t Margaret Fuller, how she is and isn’t a heroine
in Middlemarch), coupled with critical conceits that often blur her personal and her political
insights, are dangerous. For as Michie argues, “the distinction between historical and fictional
narrative” often leads merely to “symbolic juxtaposition” (17). When we bear this in mind, we
can read the letters Effie Ruskin wrote to her mother and father as the “book about the
Austrians” with a historical, not with a fictional, trajectory.
Yet it is because Effie Ruskin cannot be transposed upon these identities—poetic,
journalistic, or fictional—that she is a crucial voice for Italophiles interested in the Risorgimento
period. Indeed, as Cooper argues, Effie Millais’s vision of Italy was defined by the
Risorgimento again, a decade later, when she returned with her husband and her son where they
witnessed “the indignities” of “plague” and of “fumigation” that characterized the Papal States
between the second and the third wars for independence: “It seems that, all too often, Effie’s
continental tours coincided with times of upheaval and unrest: her honeymoon had been delayed
by the 1848 revolutions, she had visited Venice under Austrian occupation in the winter of 1849,
and now Effie planned to make her way across Italy at the height of the Risorgimento” (155). In
the final chapter of Cooper’s biography, she imagines Effie Millais in Venice as a sixty-six-yearold woman:
May 31st 1894. Effie sat on her balcony overlooking the lagoon. Venice was a
blur now. She could barely make out the shape of the Salute across the glistening
water. The letter lay in her lap. She put down her magnifying glass and softly
322
started to cry. Her mother was dead. Even if Effie could summon the strength,
there was no point in hurrying home. The news came too later. Sophia Gray was
being buried today. Effie’s brother George, writing from Bowerswell, spoke of
the ‘terrible void at the heart’ of the house. Without their mother, Bowerswell
seemed only a shell, a storehouse for memories. (229)
Cooper’s final chapter is markedly different from the afterlives often imagined in the plays, the
films, and the gossip made famous over the last century and a half. We envision Effie Millais
thinking of her family, though she was, finally, “alone in Italy”: the Gray family, the Millais
family; John Ruskin, along with his mother and father, and even London and Perth have receded
into the background once she’s returned to Venice (230). Cooper’s rendering is poignant, even if
it is, too, a biocritical fictionalization or dramatization, because it takes us into Effie Millais’s
mind. “Effie found a pen and sank back into her chair,” Cooper continues, where she “began to
write in large ungainly letters, answering her brother’s message. She could not focus on the
sheet of notepaper. She just had to hope that the words were legible to him” (229). We should
read Cooper’s final chapter as a challenge to read Effie Ruskin as a Venetian letter-writer who
worried, perhaps rightly, that her words would lose their sharpness over continents and years.
323
CHAPTER 6
Venice, 1871–1892
Risorgimento in Absentia: Hyacinth Robinson’s Venetian Letter
Whether it’s read as a manifesto of liberalism, as a defense of conservatism, as a
cautionary tale for would-be revolutionaries, or as a meditation on aesthetics framed through an
anarchist plot, Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima (1886) is often glossed as the second
of his two “political” novels.221 The Bostonians, the first “political” novel, was published the
same year. Since 1886 many people, including James, have paired The Bostonians and The
Princess Casamassima, for they seem to be, in crucial ways, much more “political” than other
novels he wrote during his middle phase or throughout his career. In both novels, characters
have to choose whether they do or don’t identify with what Kristin Boudreau calls “ideas”: “The
debate between ideas and thought is played out in both the plots and the narrative form of
221
Most scholars identify Lionel Trilling as the first in the school of Jamesian liberalism and Irving Howe as the
first in the school of Jamesian conservatism, at least for The Princess Casamassima. “James envisaged revolution,
and not merely as a convenience for his fiction,” Trilling writes; however, “he imagined a kind of revolution with
which we are no longer familiar. It was not a Marxian revolution. There is no upsurge of an angry proletariat led by
a disciplined party which plans to head a new strong state” (68). Martha Nussbaum argues that this novel calls for
gradual revolution rather than something much more radical. Gustavo Guerra’s and Julian Markels’s essays extend
the spirit of Trilling’s argument and specially discuss “liberalism.” Yet they are about Trilling’s liberalism as much
as James’s, for they read twentieth-century reception history of The Princess Casamassima with regard to
anarchism, socialism, and terrorism in light of the Red Scare. The Princess Casamassima, Howe argues, on the
other hamd, “registered his fear that everything he valued was crumbling, and it would be gratuitous to question the
depth or sincerity of this fear; but it also betrayed his doubt whether, in some ultimate moral reckoning that was
beyond his grasp, everything did not deserve to crumble” (141). Howe argues that this novel ought to be read as an
extension of James’s personal, or assumed personal, beliefs: he “lived at a time when it was still possible for a
writer like himself to make of conservatism a personal esthetic value rather than a mere ideology” (139). For
readings that extend the spirit of Howe’s argument and specifically discuss “conservatism,” see Hilary Putnam,
Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Paul Hollywood, and Mark Falcoff. Falcoff emphasizes Howe’s continued influence on
contemporary scholarship: “The Princess is not merely James’s great political novel, but his great conservative
political novel” (21).
324
James’s writings,” since his “temperamental preference for thought and feeling rather than ideas
had consequences for the kind of narratives he wrote” (xii). “Narrative possibility,” Boudreau
contends, “is most challenged by thought, feeling, and other forms of cognition that (unlike
ideas) don’t lend themselves to simple pronouncements. James’s famous technique of moving
between various centers of consciousness is most fruitful when those consciousnesses are open
to a wide range of stimuli; the narrow-minded consciousness does not invite the same kind of
narrative experimentation” (xii). I agree that this novel may not be about a cause, but about a
character’s recalcitrance to commit himself to a cause. The Princess Casamassima is primarily
about Hyacinth Robinson’s politicoaesthetic temperament, not about a revolution or a group of
revolutionaries in particular. Hyacinth Robinson isn’t, then, merely a mouthpiece for James’s
liberalism, conservatism, or reservations about late-nineteenth-century social unrest. Rather,
Hyacinth embodies a kind of fin-de-siècle ambivalence bound to the twinned psychologies of
politics and aesthetics we’ve encountered across this dissertation in other Italianate texts.
Hyacinth’s politicoaesthetic ambivalence is—like Kenyon’s and Miriam’s, like Dorothea’s and
Will’s, like Sora Lena’s and Madame Krasinska’s, and like Margaret Fuller’s, Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s, and Effie Ruskin’s—an extension of mid-century revolutionary mythologies. For
his allegiances to “the people” throughout the course of the novel both are and aren’t bound to
the revolutionary “ideas” he purports to espouse.
For just as many read The Bostonians as a novel about feminism that’s not really about
feminism, The Princess Casamassima may likewise be read as a novel about anarchism or
socialism that’s not really about anarchism or socialism as much as it is about its protagonist’s
epistemological crisis. As Edwin Yoder acknowledges, “the argument about The Princess
Casamassima has turned more upon its content and subject matter than its psychology. And
325
since it is ‘about’ the London world of revolutionary plotting and planning, into which distant
conspiratorial enterprises reach, one could hardly argue that it is not political” (480). Indeed, as
early as 1887, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyensen suggested that this novel chronicles the only “‘political
incident in the whole of James or Howells’” (qtd. in Holton 323).222 Since then, Jamesians have
continued to read The Princess Casamassima in terms of its “political” plot. Unlike many of the
other novels James published throughout his long career, The Princess Casamassima is primarily
remembered for what the characters do or don’t do, not what they think and feel.223 Some
readers complain that this emphasis on “incident” makes James’s story sensational, and they
have even compared the novel to Charles Dickens’s or to Wilkie Collins’s work. Still other
readers interpret the characters’ meandering political allegiances as plotless exegesis. These
readings often focus attention on “incident,” because the novel is populated with revolutionaries,
or even hesitating revolutionaries, and because it addresses “political” subjects much more
overtly than other works in James’s canon.
Our interests in James’s middle-phase “political” equivocations—Hyacinth Robinson is
and isn’t committed to revolution—may be bound to an oft-glossed geographical interruption in
the novel. The Princess Casamassima isn’t just about London and England. It is also about
Venice and Italy. Indeed, James’s travels to Venice during the 1870s and the 1880s left an
222
Like Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells was granted a consulship to Europe after having written a
campaign biography. Howells, who wrote Abraham Lincoln’s campaign biography for the 1860 presidential
election, served as the American Consul to Venice from 1860 to 1862. Venetian Life (1866) is his travelogue from
this period.
223
Howe and Joyce Jenkins, both suspicious of reading The Princess Casamassima as a liberal novel, emphasize
Hyacinth’s dangerous penchant for feeling and thinking about things, rather than doing things that affect political
change. Howe argues that “James showed himself to be brilliantly gifted at entering the behavior of political people,
but he had no larger view of politics as a collective mode of action. He had a sense of the revolutionaries but not of
the revolutionary movement—which might not have mattered had not the movement been at least as important a
character in the novel as the individuals who composed it” (150). Jenkins argues, similarly, that Hyacinth “cannot
act for the revolution, nor can he act against it. He is too finely aware. One might admit that the moral ideal is not
someone who thoughtlessly follows a set of prescribed rules, but someone who feels so thoroughly that he never acts
also falls short of the ideal. James says of his characters that he sees ‘their ‘doing’ . . . as, immensely their feeling,
their feeling as their doing’ (AN, p. 65). He constructs them with so much feeling that they almost never actually do
in the normal sense, or their doings are irrelevant” (116).
326
indelible mark on his middle-phase fiction and nonfiction prose, and the watery city’s place in
The Princess Casamassima is crucial to our understanding of Hyacinth’s politicoaesthetic
temperament, for it affects the ways the thinks, feels, and understands revolution. Ultimately,
this chapter argues that by reading The Princess Casamassima as one of James’s Venetian and
Italian novels we can make sense—perhaps counter-intuitively—of Hyacinth’s ambivalence
about fin-de-siècle revolution in London. For just as Middlemarch is about Rome as much as it
is about Middlemarch, so, too, The Princess Casamassima is about Venice as much as it is about
London. Like Eliot, James addresses Italian (or Italianate) revolution obliquely as he frames his
center of consciousness’s ever-shifting politicoaesthetic temperament, and as he contends with
historical and historiographical crises through Hyacinth’s epistolary representation of this place.
Moreover, just as the Rome chapters in Middlemarch upend Dorothea’s and Will’s
understanding of Italian mythology, the Venince chapters in The Princess Casamassima force
Hyacinth to reconcile his often at-odds allegiances to politics and to aesthetics.
Still, though James wrote many books about Anglo-Americans in Italy, The Princess
Casamassima isn’t traditionally considered to be one of them. Roderick Hudson (1875), Daisy
Miller (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Aspern Papers (1888), The Wings of the Dove
(1902), and Italian Hours (1909) are among James’s most important Italian books. The Princess
Casamassima is often omitted from this catalogue, in part because Hyacinth doesn’t remain in
Venice for very long, and in part because many people read Venice as a respite from the
socialist, anarchist, or terrorist plots that fill the London pages. Yet Venice and London are both
central to James’s portrait of fin-de-siècle revolution. While many critics assume James to have
been a conservative, and thus to have been disinterested in the aftermath of the Risorgimento and
the Unification of Italy, it’s clear that he was still haunted by this history as late as 1903, when
327
he wrote his two-volume biography William Wetmore Story and Friends, which chronicles
Story’s life in Rome and in Florence during the 1840s and the 1850s.224 Though we often misremember James as an anti-republican, his political sentiment was, in many ways, just as torn as
Fuller’s, Eliot’s, Barrett Browning’s, and Ruskin’s: James’s Story biography shows how he
thought carefully about historicizing the sculptor’s life within the drama of the Risorgimento and
the Unification of Italy.
When Jamesians do read The Princess Casamassima as an Italian novel, they often do so
only insofar as reminding us that it may be a sequel to Roderick Hudson. Indeed, Christina Light
appears as a character in Roderick Hudson and in The Princess Casamassima. Between
Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassima, however, she transforms into James’s
eponymous heroine.225 Yet I argue that The Princess Casamassima is also a revision of or a
sequel to Hawthorne’s mid-century portrait of revolutionary Italy.226 Indeed, many critics have
224
For a discussion of the Risorgimento and the Unification of Italy in William Wetmore Story and Friends, see
Frederick Wegener. For a discussion of James’s biographies of Hawthorne and of Story, see Willie Tolliver’s Henry
James as a Biographer: A Self Among Others.
225
Roderick’s ennui is, in many ways, an extension of Kenyon’s in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun. For
connections between The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson, see Sanford Marovitz, Robert Emmet Long, and
Sheila Teahan. James wrote Roderick Hudson just after finishing his biography Hawthorne (though it was first
published in 1879); many critics read Roderick Hudson as a corrective of The Marble Faun and of Hawthornean
politics and aesthetics much more generally, and they argue the novel was spurred by the biography. Roderick
Hudson and The Princess Casamassima were both published in The Atlantic Monthly. Roderick Hudson was
serialized in The Atlantic Monthly between January and December 1875. J. R. Osgood published the book edition in
November 1875, just before the final installment was released in serial. The Princess Casamassima was also
serialized in The Atlantic Monthly between September 1885 and October 1886. Macmillan published the threevolume novel in 1886. Josephine Gattuso Hendin acknowledges, “The Princess Casamassima is generally not
considered one of James’s Italian novels”; however, it is, in many ways, a redress of Roderick Hudson. “Set in
London,” Hendin continues, “and, James wrote in the preface to the New York Edition, the product of his walks
through its slums and sorrows, the novel is generally considered his attempt at Dickensian realism. Yet it also
derives from James’s inability to let either Italy or Christina Light alone. Italy is alive in the novel as memory, as
experience, as a crucible for changes in aesthetic and political sensibility. The twinned themes of politics and art
that emerged in Roderick Hudson, and the use of different regions of Italy for expressing specific attitudes, survive
in heightened form. The opposing claims of Christina’s role as the Princess Casamassima and her American
yearnings reach a far higher pitch” (79). For further connections between Roderick Hudson and The Princess
Casamassima, see M. E. Grenander, B. Richards, Ronald Emerick, Warren Johnson, Paul Saint-Amour, and Andrew
Cutting.
226
In Roderick Hudson, Rowland Mallet, an art connoisseur from Boston, travels to Northampton before departing
for Rome; in Northampton, he meets the law-student-sculptor Roderick Hudson, who has completed a sculpture
called Thirst. Rowland is so impressed with Thirst that he begs Roderick to join him in Italy, where he will
328
dubbed Roderick Hudson James’s response to Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). Within the
logic of this dissertation, then, I argue that we can connect the dots from The Marble Faun to The
Princess Casamassima through Roderick Hudson. The Princess Casamassima may be, in fact,
the fin-de-siècle sequel to both. For even without reading Roderick Hudson as the chronological
intermediary between Hawthorne’s and James’s outlying novels, we can still trace meaningful
generic parallels between The Marble Faun and The Princess Casamassima: both are defined by
diffuse storylines, and both are and aren’t predicated on political intrigue in which the
characters’ Italian sojourns—to Rome, to Florence, and, finally, to Venice—mark
politicoaesthetic turning points.
All of these intersections remind us that this novel holds a distinctive, even selfreferential, position within James’s canon. The Princess Casamassima may be the decadent
apex of this trio, but it also holds a rarefied position within Anglo-American “political” fictions.
For if we read Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, his last full-length novel, and James’s Roderick
Hudson, his first full-length novel, as studies of Italianate ambivalence, then we should also read
The Princess Casamassima as their logical extension. Just as Hoffendahl’s plot determines the
rest of the novel but remains unarticulated, The Princess Casamassima is predicated on a
genealogy of implicit Hawthornean and Jamesian fictions: Miriam’s crime and Roderick’s
world-weariness are, then, Hoffendahl’s historical antecedents. Indeed, Hyacinth is defined by a
commission his work for two years. Rowland hopes Italy will be the inspiration Roderick needs to abandon the law
and to sculpt professionally. Once Roderick finishes his first Roman work, he establishes a reputation as a brilliant,
if eccentric, artist within cosmopolitan expatriate circles. Roderick’s most important commission is from Christina
Light, a young woman who visits the studio with her mother and her surrogate father, the Cavaliere. Roderick falls
in love with the young woman, who professes not to reciprocate his affections, while sculpting her bust. Soon
thereafter, Christina promises to marry the Prince Casamassima. Like her mother, then, Christina conscripts herself
to an unhappy life with an Italian man who will support her financially, but who she may or may not really love.
After finishing Christina’s bust, Roderick isn’t able to sculpt, and once he realizes Christina will never love him or
marry him, he attempts suicide. At the end of the novel, Rowland realizes that Roderick must leave Rome in order
to recover, but he dies mysteriously, almost as soon as they leave. Though Rowland blames himself, James
intimates that Roderick’s death was, in fact, a suicide inspired by his undying, perhaps requited, perhaps unrequited,
love for Christina, who is now known as the Princess Casamassima.
329
Miriam-like and Roderick-like ambivalence: his half-hearted interest in revolution and his
supposed turn from politics to aesthetics in “demoralised” Venice exaggerate the ambivalence
that I’ve already traced in The Marble Faun (and that many Hawthorneans and Jameseans have
already traced in Roderick Hudson). Hoffendahl’s plot may be the mentioned but unarticulated
revolution in The Princess Casamassima, but the Italian Risorgimento is the unmentioned and
unarticulated revolutionary spectre. The Italian Risorgimento appears elliptically in The Marble
Faun through Miriam’s and Kenyon’s conversations about their representational dilemmas, but
for Hyacinth, this ineffable revolution seems to be the secreted plot writ large. It seems,
moreover, to be Jamesian “going behind” writ large. James’s treatment of politicoaesthetic
ambivalence is, then, a meditation on genre as much as it is a meditation on character.
For these reasons, the plot of the novel can’t be dismissed: it is the impetus for
Hyacinth’s politicoaesthetic ambivalence on a number of levels. I argue that this ambivalence—
more than the revolutionary ideas Hyacinth may or may not support—is the “political”
preoccupation of the novel. For as M. Paul admits to Hyacinth early in the novel, their
involvement in Hoffendahl’s movement demands something much more nuanced than “plot”
alone. When Hyacinth asks M. Paul to explain Hoffendahl’s “plot,” M. Paul says, “‘Oh, it’s no
plot. I don’t think I care much for plots.’ And with his mild, steady, light-blue English eye, M.
Paul certainly had not much the appearance of a conspirator” (James, The Princess Casamassima
130). “‘Isn’t it a new era?’” Hyacinth asks, “rather disappointed” (130). “‘Well, I don’t know,’”
M. Paul responds, casually, “‘it’s just a little movement’” (130). Of course, this conversation
can be read in terms of Hoffendahl’s elusive revolution, especially since Hyacinth asks M. Paul
many of the same questions critics have raised about him: what and who is he committing
himself to? And how committed is he? But this conversation also raises much more
330
fundamental questions: how is The Princess Casamassima one of James’s most “political”
fictions? And what does it even mean for the plot or for a character to be “political”? While it’s
clear that this novel is much more explicitly “political” than other James novels, it’s still not
clear what we mean by this ever-present moniker or why it’s a significant one.227
Many critics have argued compellingly that this work is a realist representation of
London’s anarchist or socialist circles during the 1880s, and it is political because Hyacinth
becomes a martyr either for his affiliation, or for his disaffiliation, to/from the cause.228 M. Paul,
Hyacinth, and the Princess may have seemed shocking to James’s readers in 1886, who were
accustomed to the rarefied murmurings of those well-to-do Bostonians, New Yorkers, or
Londoners who populate many of his other novels. In The Princess Casamassima, however, the
characters’ interests in political “plot” aren’t relegated to drawing-room conversations. Instead,
conversations about “the people” are the preoccupation of the novel. One of the reasons James’s
treatment of these political movements (anarchism? socialism? even terrorism?) continues to be
troubling, even when we are mindful of the elusive “plot,” is that this novel, despite its title, isn’t
unambivalently devoted to a single character either. James writes, both in the preface to
Roderick Hudson and in the preface to The Princess Casamassima, that he always knew he
wanted to return to her, for she had not yet been “completely recorded” (The Princess
Casamassima 45). Yet while the title of the novel suggests that the Princess is the main
227
James dilates on the necessary union between plot or “incident” and “character” in “The Art of Fiction,” which
he published in Longman’s Magazine in 1884 and republished in Partial Portraits in 1888. In this essay, James
shows how “incident,” or lack of “incident,” is central to our understanding of “character,” and he argues that the
two are, ultimately, inseparable. “There is an old-fashioned distinction between the novel of characters and the
novel of incident which must have cost many a smile to the intending fabulist who was keen about his work” (Tales
of Henry James 384–385). James argues that he “can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can
imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture one says of character, when one says novel one
says of incident, and the terms may be transposed at will” (385).
228
For readings of The Princess Casamassima that focus attention on genre, see Taylor Stoehr, Christine DeVine,
David Stivers, Roxana Olean (for how James’s revolutionary narrative interprets romance, realism, or is even
something much more akin to journalism); and Mark Seltzer (for how James’s depiction of Hoffendahl is
Dickensian or Foucaultian).
331
character, Hyacinth is the center of consciousness. Warren Johnson even questions why the
novel is titled The Princess Casamassima instead of Hyacinth Robinson. Johnson also reminds
us that Roderick Hudson is about Rowland Mallet’s world-weariness as much as, if not more
than, it is about the title figure’s. To the questions I’ve already posed, then, we should also add:
why is Hyacinth the center of consciousness? Is he actually the hero or the anti-hero? Or does
the novel resist such easy classification?
In short, The Princess Casamassima is about a man whose mother is French and whose
father is English, but it’s also about a Corinne-like woman who marries into the Italian
aristocracy and finds her isolation to be unbearable. Like Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy
(1807) or Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), James’s The Princess
Casamassima has a transnational identity. While Corinne and Aurora Leigh have Italian mothers
and British fathers, Christina Light has an American mother and an Italian father. M. E.
Grenander traces Christina’s Italo-American genealogy by collating information she reveals
about herself across Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassima: “in talking to Hyacinth,”
Grenander reminds us, Christina “‘mentioned her parentage—American on the mother’s side,
Italian on the father’s’” (310). When Christina marries the Prince at the end of Roderick
Hudson, she claims her Italian heritage afresh; by the end of The Princess Casamassima, though,
she jilts her husband. Staël’s title, Corinne, or Italy may be an important prefiguration for the
Princess’s ambivalent relationship to her Italian father and her Italian husband. The “or”
between “Corinne” and “Italy” suggests that this book is primarily about a character or about a
nation, but the conjunction also implies the two are somewhat interchangeable. Christina, too, is
defined by her ambivalent Italian connections, even during her self-imposed exile in London.
332
Critics who are interested in how the novel is or isn’t a realist representation of London
tend to focus attention on Hyacinth, however, and they often suggest that he inherits his
revolutionary impulses from his family. His father, his mother, and his maternal grandfather
motivate Hyacinth’s turn to Hoffendahl, albeit in different ways. Collectively, this history is the
foundation for Hyacinth’s ambivalent understanding of his own revolutionary period, and his
tragedy may be inscribed in the gory spectacle of each family member’s death. Hyacinthe Vivier
was killed during the French Revolution: he “( . . . had fallen, in the blood-stained streets of
Paris, on a barricade, with his gun in his hand)” (James, The Princess Casamassima 167).
James’s anecdote about Vivier may be parenthetical, but it prophesizes the secreted
revolutionary impulses his daughter and his grandson act upon, or promise to act upon, in
London decades later. For while the watchmaker may have been committed to the French
Revolution in spirit, his death is a tragic accident, and, ultimately, he isn’t able to fulfill his
political ideals. Florentine, his daughter, and Hyacinth, his grandson, arguably experience the
same fate. Though Florentine, Hyacinth, and the other characters seem to romanticize Vivier’s
death, he isn’t a martyr of the war proper. By misremembering or misreading his death (they
often think of him as a fallen hero), the Vivier family inherits his stultified political aspirations.
Hyacinth’s parents likewise embody this damned revolutionary pedigree. Their
catastrophic affair personifies mid-nineteenth-century political history: his father Lord Frederick
Purvis refused to marry his mother Florentine when she became pregnant with Hyacinth. She
“had been a daughter of the wild French people,” but he belonged to the English aristocracy, and
class prevented him from marrying her (167). Humiliated, she murdered him and spent the rest
of her life in prison, estranged from her bastard son.229 Hyacinth thus embodies the violent class
229
Critics interested in reading The Princess Casamassima as Dickensian have suggested that this scene echoes
Little Dorrit (1857).
333
warfare that gripped France and England throughout the nineteenth century. Ultimately,
Hyacinth’s own ambivalent involvement in a fin-de-siècle revolution pits his mother’s crises
against his father’s. Indeed, like his grandfather, his father becomes a haunting presence: both
motivate his interest in working-class politics. Though Hyacinth never meets his father or his
grandfather, and though nobody tells him that the strange prisoner he sees on her deathbed is his
mother, he seems to intuit that his own identity is much more complicated than he’s been told.
In fact, though Pinnie, Hyacinth’s foster mother, calls him her “little aristocrat,” again and again
throughout the opening chapters, he always thinks of himself as a working-class boy. Hyacinth’s
growing distaste for the nickname and for the aristocracy becomes, then, an uncanny celebration
of his disinheritance. For if Pinnie’s nickname is her quiet way of distinguishing Hyacinth from
the other working-class children, then his mother’s and his father’s histories remain the explosive
secret he has to uncover on his own as an adult. Just as he learns about his mother’s and his
father’s storied past, he also becomes involved in underground resistance groups with the other
working-class men he knows. Far from becoming the Duke Pinnie once envisioned, Hyacinth is,
finally asked to kill one. After many conversations with M. Paul and with Eustache Poupin (who
“had come to England after the Commune of 1871, to escape the reprisals of the government of
M. Thiers, and had remained there in spite of amnesties and rehabilitations”), Hyacinth pledges
to be an assassin for the mysterious Hoffendahl (114). Hyacinth’s allegiances to the working
class are, then, consistently read as incipient protests against his phantom father and against the
aristocracy to which he does and doesn’t belong. Indeed, as the inheritor of two generations of
revolutionary politics, with some working-class relatives and some aristocratic relatives,
Hyacinth embodies political equivocation.
334
Ultimately, Hyacinth’s solution to this political equivocation is suicide. By reading
Hyacinth’s ambivalence seriously, I join existing discussions about The Princess Casamassima
that focus attention on his assumed revolutionary ideas. Yet it’s important to distinguish
ambivalence from what other critics have called James’s apolitical, post-political, or transpolitical disposition. Tony Tanner may be the most famous among these critics. “What is
revealing in The Princess Casamassima,” he argues, “is the use of Venice-as-spectacle as a site
of total and terminal depoliticization” (176). In contrast to Tanner, Yoder contends that this
novel is “undoubtedly political,” though “the themes are better described as trans- or postpolitical,” because the novel is about Hyacinth’s inherited “political commitment” to a revolution
much more than it is about the revolution itself (481).230 “The Princess Casamassima may be
read,” Yoder argues, “as a penetrating inquiry into the varieties—and more especially the
quality, moral and otherwise—of political commitment, and in this respect it is properly
described as post-political” (486).231 Tanner and Yoder seem to suggest opposing readings of
James’s revolutionary plot, at least at first: Tanner argues that it’s depoliticized and Yoder
argues that it seems so contemporary at moments that it also seems trans- or post-political. Yet
when we read Tanner’s and Yoder’s arguments in conversation with one another, we’re
reminded that Hyacinth’s revolution appears as a lingering preoccupation—but remains illegible
across the plot of the novel. Even once Hyacinth kills himself, it’s impossibly to trace the series
of unfolding events that lead to this conclusion. Within the logic of the novel, Hyacinth’s
revolution appears, then, as a meditation on politicoaesthetic temperament, not as a plot.
230
Martha Banta likewise shows how our understanding of the political, or the apolitical, nature of The Princess
Casamassima is inflected by our post-post-modern sensibility.
231
In fact, Yoder argues that this novel, “may seem today considerably more topical than James imagined it could
be a century ago, though in a different way than Trilling or Howe assumed,” since James’s representation of terror is
psychological as much as it is political (481).
335
In many ways, then, this chapter diverges from traditional lines of interpretation, which
often discuss what Hyacinth does and doesn’t believe, and which often parse the representational
collision between realism and “political” movements (anarchism, socialism, and terrorism) in
James’s novel. These readings often declare Hyacinth’s suicide a decidedly heroic or a
decidedly unheroic act. Depending on how one reads it, the suicide appears as an affirmation or
as the ultimate condemnation of Hyacinth’s decision to thwart Hoffendahl’s “plot.”232 But is
James really suggesting that we read Hyacinth’s self-sacrifice in terms of heroics or anti-heroics?
And is it even critically responsible for us to draw parallels between our readings of the suicide
and James’s personal “political” beliefs? Hyacinth’s dead body can’t be read as the symbol for
James’s fictional representation of liberalism or conservatism. Still, revolutionary politics,
especially vague revolutionary politics, are central to the plot of the novel, and I argue that this
vagueness is crucial to James’s representation of political subjectivity. I take Yoder’s argument
about “varieties” of political/apolitical experience seriously, then, and I argue that ambivalence
ought to be read along this spectrum.
To be sure, Hyacinth’s suicide can’t be dismissed, but his Grand Tour to Paris and to
Venice is an equally definitive moment, because it is Hyacinth’s first-person expression of
ambivalence. Most critics of The Princess Casamassima mention the Paris-Venice chapters
(XXIX–XXX), because Hyacinth’s “Grand Tour” may be the one moment in the novel when he
simultaneously assumes his father’s aristocratic identity and imagines his grandfather’s
revolutionary experience. Most critics also discuss the letter Hyacinth writes to the Princess
232
Melchiori’s reading of Hyacinth’s letter and Hyacinth’s suicide may be the most damning: “I have already
questioned the psychological acceptability in the Venice letter of James’s transfer of his own conservative view to a
protagonist pledged and sworn to revolutionary activity. This was, of course, a way of putting pressure on the
reader: if he shared Hyacinth’s socialist views he was being discreetly invited to think again. Hyacinth’s rejection
of his early assumptions as to the nature of society and as to the relations between the classes in light of subsequent
knowledge was an implicit invitation to any reader whose views inclined in the same direction to do the same”
(130).
336
from Venice, not only because it marks an important narrative break from third-person to firstperson accounts of his subjectivity, but also because it shows how he changes the way he thinks
and feels. By the end of the letter, he rededicates his allegiances to politics and his allegiances to
aesthetics through an ultimatum, not unlike the one Margaret Fuller poses in her letter to William
Henry Channing (discussed in the introduction).233 Most critics, in fact, argue that he chooses
one (aesthetics) over the other (politics), since he decries Hoffendahl’s ideas about
“redistribution” as monomaniacal. Hyacinth may or may not commit himself to aesthetics over
politics in this moment; he does, however, realize that “redistribution” is much more complicated
than he’d imagined when he first pledged his life to Hoffendahl. Still, many readers consider
this to be the moment when Hyacinth damns himself, since he chooses self-indulgence,
hedonism, or even art over “the people.”
In this way, readings of the Venice letter often parallel readings of the suicide: his
waverings over Hoffendahl represent his heroic or his unheroic potential. Tanner, in fact, has
even suggested that this letter is Hyacinth’s “slightly premature suicide note” (176). Tanner may
be right, but Hyacinth’s ennui is also strangely revivifying: the Venice letter shows how he
realizes the necessary, if difficult, union between politics and aesthetics. While critics tend to
agree that this letter marks a turning point for Hyacinth, though, their treatment of the ParisVenice chapters is often cursory since they oversimplify Hyacinth’s letter by suggesting that he
chooses between politics and aesthetics, and since they take it for granted that he reaches this
233
While few readings of The Princess Casamassima focus serious attention on the letter Hyacinth writes to the
Princess from Venice, many address it in passing. For the fullest discussions, see Melchiori, Tanner, Christopher
Stuart, and Nelly Valtet-Comet. Melchiori argues that Venice is significant because it’s where Hyacinth questions
“the revolutionary mystique” embodied by Hoffendahl; Hyacinth turns, then, from politics to aesthetics and from old
to new civilizations (127). Tanner likewise argues that this letter “subverts the whole novel” and shows how “there
is simply nowhere for Hyacinth to go and, really, nothing for him to do” (176).
337
crisis in Venice (rather than, say, in Paris, where he encounters the ghost of Hyacinthe Vivier).234
It’s important to reconsider these assumptions, though, for revolutionary politics, especially
vague revolutionary politics, are central to the plot of the novel, and vagueness is crucial to
James’s representation of subjectivity. Rather than reading the Venice letter as a suicide note or
as a hedonist conscription, we should read it as a meaningful commitment to ambivalence.
For however vague James may be about what Hyacinth does or doesn’t believe, the
narrator consistently draws our attention to his indecision, from the moment when he pledges his
life to Hoffendahl until the moment when he kills himself. Hoffendahl’s plot remains a mystery
to Hyacinth, to M. Paul, to the other revolutionaries, and, crucially, to us. By the time Hyacinth
writes the letter, he is worried that this “plot” is dangerously and naïvely extreme, and he is
terrified by the unknowns Hoffendahl has come to represent. Venice, then, is the place where
Hyacinth reaches clarity; here, he shies away from Hoffendahl’s impersonal network, and he
rejects his prior allegiances to such extremism for something much more moderate, if equally
vague. The letter shows how Hyacinth disavows his pledge, and this is what many critics
emphasize. Yet the Venice letter is also an epistemological turning point, which is why it’s
important that James shifts from the third-person to the first-person narrative. For the rest of the
novel, Hyacinth is defined by his ambivalence, and his ambivalence doesn’t just reflect his shift
234
For discussions that pit politics and aesthetics against one another, see Trilling, John Kimmey, Melchiori,
Malashri Lal, Tanner, Jenkins, Collin Meissner, James Seaton, Stuart, and Valtet-Comet. Stuart argues that “critics
who describe Hyacinth’s dilemma as an inability to reconcile the claims of politics with the claims of art have
generally had to ignore Hyacinth’s insistence throughout the last third of the novel that the preservation of artistic
masterpieces must outweigh the claims of the masses,” which affirms “the conservative political implications of his
aesthetic ideals” (23). Tanner’s distillation of Hyacinth’s epistolary crisis may be the pithiest discussion the politicsversus-aesthetics debate: “At a stroke—or as many strokes of the pen required to write the letter—Hyacinth’s
disenchantment with, and disengagement from, any idea of revolution or change, indeed his enlistment in support of
the status quo and privilege-kept-in-place, is enacted and completed” (176). Jenkins reads “Art against Equality,”
and with Peter Singer’s influence in mind, she argues that “if prosperity for all and art are both desirable, but cannot
both be had, one must choose. The Princess Casamassima ends in suicide because of the difficulty of making that
choice” (108). Boudreau, on the other hand, distills the dangers of this politics-versus-aesthetics mindset: “The
problem for James is not as simple as the familiar distinction between politics and aesthetics, but is rather one of
further refinements within these categories” (88). Both, Boudreau argues, “can be approached either ideologically
or empirically through thoughts and feelings” (88).
338
in ideas (from extremism to something much more moderate). It is a lingering mood that shows
how he thinks and feels with a rarefied taste for vagueness. While this politicoaesthetic
temperament may be stultifying for Hyacinth—indeed, it likely leads him to suicide—it also
forces him to define revolution humanely. For if “the people” will ever realize true selfactualization, Hyacinth discovers, they must have much more than ascetic liberties. Their lives
must also be beautiful. It is significant that Hyacinth comes to this realization in Venice, where
he is overwhelmed both by Renaissance art and by post-Risorgimento poverty.
Though Hyacinth’s Venetian experience is limited to a single chapter, it represents his
affective turning point. For as Christopher Stuart argues, the letter Hyacinth writes to the
Princess is a defining moment, not only in The Princess Casamassima, but also, and much more
importantly, in James’s canon: “Nowhere in James’s oeuvre are his ideas about the ultimate
value of civilization made more clear or explicit than in chapters XXIX–XXX, which detail
Hyacinth’s continental explorations” in Paris and in Venice (33). Stuart is right to read chapters
XXIX–XXX as exceptions, since these are the only chapters that don’t take place in London, and
this letter is the only time when Hyacinth is the narrator of his own story. For these reasons,
most critics discuss Hyacinth’s impressions of Paris and of Venice in passing, but emphasize
Paris, especially given his family’s history with the French Revolution. Consequently, as
exceptional as the Venice letter may be, it remains enigmatic for readers who focus attention on
mid-century politics in England and France.
Venice is the final destination on Hyacinth’s Grand Tour, and coupled with the fact that
this letter is a text within a text, Italy appears as a narratively distinct place within the novel.
James juxtaposes Paris and Venice in the Continental diptych, but Hyacinth’s interest in the
French Revolution seems naïve—and even misplaced—by the end of the letter he writes in Italy.
339
James narrates the Parisian chapters in free indirect discourse, and chapters XXIX–XXX detail
his séance with his grandfather, who appears as a ghost. The two Hyacinths visit various
revolutionary landmarks in Paris, from the Rue Royale to the Place de la Révolution. This
séance-like commune seems all the more overwrought because the narrator renders Hyacinth’s
impressions of Vivier and of Vivier’s experiences at these historic landmarks through the young
man’s consciousness. James’s narrative becomes, consequently, increasingly diffuse in Paris,
and the implied author teases the reader to question whether the ghost of Vivier does, or doesn’t,
seem real to Hyacinth, who seems to be hallucinating. Indeed, if The Princess Casamassima is
realism, then it is realism only because moments like these represent the trauma of his historical
consciousness in vivid detail. Still, while Hyacinth is haunted by the French Revolution
(embodied not by his grandfather, but by his grandfather’s “spirit”), his memories are defined by
sentimental nostalgia: “what was most present was not its turpitude and horror, but its
magnificent energy, the spirit of life that had been in it, not the spirit of death” (James, The
Princess Casamassima 393). While walking through the Place de la Révolution, “a sudden sense
overtook him, making his heart sink with a kind of desolation—a sense of everything that might
hold one to the world, of the sweetness of not dying, the fascination of great cities, the charm of
travel and discovery, the generosity of admiration” (393). It’s surprising that this “rapid
vision”—which superimposes a phantom “guillotine” on real monuments and real memorials
constructed later in the nineteenth-century—reminds him of “the sweetness of not dying” (393).
Hyacinth seems, in fact, to personalize the French Revolution during this moment when his death
appears just as imminent as his grandfather’s. He understands the past through the present, and
this achronological sensibility affects the rest of the novel.
340
Ultimately, Hyacinth’s “rapid vision” shows how his historical consciousness is defined
by a way of thinking or feeling, not necessarily by actual events, even when he’s traveling from
loaded site to loaded site in Paris. While Hyacinth’s time in France is defined by the afterlife of
1848, it is, in Italy, much more coyly remembered. The unrest that gave rise to these continental
revolutions lingered and remained unresolved in Italy far longer: the Italian Republic finally
incorporated Venice in 1866, exactly twenty years before The Princess Casamassima was
published. When he writes to the Princess from Venice, he is again overwhelmed by his
moment-to-moment “retrospections” (393). Hyacinth’s letter describes his present-tense
experiences with an intimate “coolness” (for the people and for the place) that even James’s free
indirect discourse cannot express, and it shows how he becomes self-conscious of his
revolutionary epistemology. Indeed, his continental experiences often seem overwrought
because they’re simultaneously personal and impersonal: perhaps because he is and isn’t the
inheritor of his grandfather’s legacy, his sentimental perspective on revolutionary history is
disquieting. Next to his devoted interest in the “legend of the French Revolution,” his silence
over the Italian Risorgimento is provocative (393). For James, meaning often lies in such telling
mutedness.
When Hyacinth arrives in Venice, he is still languishing over a serious bout with Parisian
ennui, and he writes to the Princess in this world-weary mood. The narrator introduces the letter
Hyacinth writes from Venice with a cryptic preface: “Three weeks after this he found himself in
Venice, whence he addressed to the Princess Casamassima a letter of which I reproduce the
principal passages” (394). Hyacinth’s arrival in Venice is disorienting, partly because the
narrator introduces him to this city through a letter, or, as he acknowledges, the “principal
passages” of a letter, that was sent back to London. The narrator’s editorial handling—his
341
interception, his preface, and his decision to excerpt it at the end of the section on Paris—
underscores Hyacinth’s provocative silence about post-Risorgimento life in Venice. Ultimately,
the non-“principle” passages may be read as legible extensions or legible exaggerations of
Hyacinth’s continued silence over the revolution in London.
Silence is, of course, one of the thematic preoccupations of The Princess Casamassima;
this, coupled with the fact that the narrator introduces the letter by stressing the presence of
omissions, invites us to question what exactly is left out and why. James’s narrative is selfconsciously elusive, and it documents Hyacinth’s Venetian experience at a double remove: both
the narrator and the character filter the letter’s content, a fact that underlines Hyacinth’s penchant
for second-hand information and censored, or even self-censored, human contact. Hyacinth’s
letter shows, too, how Hoffendahl-esque secreting pervades the rest of the novel—even within
this private text.235 At first glance, Hyacinth’s “retrospections” of Venice are decidedly muted,
perhaps because they immediately follow the vivid collision of past and present he experiences
in Paris. The narrator’s piece-by-piece parceling of the letter reminds us that this excerpted
correspondence may be part of a larger network of assumed secrets and assumed silences. When
read in this light, it isn’t, perhaps, surprising that would-be references to post-Risorgimento
Venice are excluded from his experience, at least his narratable experience, abroad.
The narrator’s equivocal preface to this place where and this moment when Hyacinth has,
as if by chance, “found himself” reveals that the novel is really about subjectivity as much as it is
about politics or aesthetics. For while the verb “found” maps Hyacinth’s travel from place to
place, the context suggests that this isn’t just a geographical realization. Instead, the phrase
235
Seltzer, in fact, interprets Hoffendahl as a narrative or a metanarrative force within the novel; the secret plot is
important because it shows how power structures determine what Hyacinth can and cannot know. The exposition of
James’s novel depends, Seltzer argues, on Foucaultian epistemologies within the text, but also between the text and
the reader.
342
“found himself in Venice” suggests the existential, if passive, meanings of his Italian sojourn.
When he leaves London, and travels to Paris and to Venice, Hyacinth is already unnerved by his
promise to sacrifice himself on behalf of “the people.” While abroad, he struggles to come to
terms with who he really is and why the sacrifice he is making really matters. Just as Hyacinth’s
parents’ and grandparents’ are defined by their secreted biographies, Hyacinth’s political identity
remains the great enigma of The Princess Casamassima; both of their histories affect his
understanding of his own Grand Tour, especially in Venice, for once he leaves Paris, he also
leaves Vivier’s legacy behind. Venice represents an unchartered territory, geographically and
psychologically. It seems he cannot “find himself” until he’s truly alone.
Hyacinth’s letter to the Princess is, in many ways, a strange confession, one in which he
claims a political identity that is necessarily intensely private and intensely public. For if, as
Boudreau argues, “the conflict in the novel is not, as many have claimed, between the personal
and the political,” then we can understand how and why the letter is a linchpin within Hyacinth’s
epistemology. Moreover, we can also understand the manner in which Hyacinth’s ambivalence
forces worlds that may otherwise be separate (Pinnie’s/Vetch’s circle, M. Paul’s circle,
Hoffendahl’s circle, the Princess’s circle, the bookbinders, as well as the spectres of his
immediate family) into collision, since, to borrow Boudreau’s coinage, his “most private feelings
are also deeply political” (100). By sending a letter from Venice to London, Hyacinth tries to
bridge the distance between the person the Princess imagines him to be and the person he
realizes he really is. Hyacinth’s letter belongs to a long epistolary history connecting people in
Venice with people in London and Boston: Margaret Fuller published the dispatches she wrote
to her editor in the New-York Daily Tribune (1846–1850); Claude writes to Eustace, and
Georgina Trevellyn writes to Louisa in Arthur Hugh Clough’s Amours de Voyage (1849); John
343
and Effie Ruskin wrote letters to their parents (among other people) in England and Scotland
(1849–1850; 1851–1852); Amy Dorrit writes to Arthur Clennam in Dickens’s Little Dorrit
(1855–1857); Milly Theale writes to Merton Densher in James’s The Wings of the Dove
(1902).236 Though most of these correspondences are specifically private or specifically public,
they often blur such definitive boundaries. As we’ve seen, Fuller’s and Ruskin’s letters address
their varied senses of ambivalence toward the Risorgimento in Rome, in Florence, and in Venice.
Hyacinth’s letter is also about a particular moment in Venetian history as much as it is about
what he thinks and feels privately in this place.
Hyacinth’s letter should be read in the context of these storied correspondences, since it
exaggerates the world-weary mood that characterizes his fictional and nonfictional predecessors.
Yet the letter from Venice also has a practical function within the logic of the narrative. It is
shorthand for Jamesian fictions that take place in Italy (what happens to Hyacinth and what
happens to Roderick Hudson, Rowland Mallett, and the Princess in Roderick Hudson), and for
Italian revolutions that seem to be unrepresentable by the third-person narrator throughout the
rest of The Princess Casamassima. Tanner, in fact, argues that this letter quickens the plot:
“The decision to relate the drastic shift in allegiances in a letter has certain obvious advantages
for James, advantages which can be seen as evasions and avoidances and a very happy (for
James) short-cut. The actual material life of contemporary Venice does not have to be engaged
with” (175). Indeed, if the Venice letter is a narratological anomaly, then both the “Venice” part
and the “letter” part are exceptional. Venice remains crucially ineffable within James’s
236
Melchiori, Tanner, Meissner, Valtet-Comet, and Boudreau are among the critics who read the letter as a letter and
stress the importance of Jamesian epistolarity. Tanner and Boudreau both term the letter “oblique” (Tanner 174;
Boudreau 95). Meissner’s reading focuses attention on Hyacinth’s sense of immediacy, and he argues that this letter
is distinctly Paterian: “Hyacinth’s letter is a perfect example of James's distinction between an active (Jamesian)
and passive (aestheticist) art. In the larger narrative of The Princess Casamassima, Hyacinth’s epistolary narrative
thus assumes its own temporary literary power, displacing the textual frame by elevating itself as a work of art” (68).
344
narratological lexicon, but it is also a place to which Hyacinth returns, in his imagination, across
subsequent chapters. Beyond its postmark, though, the letter is singular because it’s the only one
transcribed by the narrator throughout The Princess Casamassima. Once Hyacinth returns to
London from Venice, the plot of the novel slows while he waits for an anticipated letter,
Hoffendahl’s summons, which doesn’t arrive until the final chapters. Ultimately, the content of
this other life-altering letter remains completely unnarrated. When Hoffendahl writes Schinkel
with Hyacinth’s order to assassinate the duke, the letter is circulated from person to person under
the narrator’s auspices, and when Hyacinth finally receives it, the narrator shows how he pockets
and reads it, but doesn’t reveal the words themselves. Hoffendahl’s letter realizes the “plot”
Hyacinth and M. Paul discussed, but the “plot” remains elusive even at the end of the novel. At
this moment, then, the narrator shows how written correspondences draw our attention to, but
also from, events that cannot be fully represented, a fact that reminds us that this Venice letter is
decidedly censored.
It’s telling, then, that the content of the Venice letter shows how Hyacinth has come to
understand this city in terms of ineffability: “‘This is probably the last time I shall write to you
before I return to London. Of course you have been in this place, and you will easily understand
why here, especially here, the spirit should move me. Dear Princess, what an enchanted city,
what ineffable impressions, what a revelation of the exquisite!’” (James, The Princess
Casamassima 394). Just as Hyacinth’s letter is one of many in a tradition of self-conscious
Venetian correspondents, his meditation on his inability to articulate what he thinks and feels
revives what critics often consider to be a Romantic convention. It is, arguably, the identifying
feature of world-weary travellers as disparate as George Gordon, Lord Byron; Anna Jameson,
Théophile Gautier, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. James likewise confesses that
345
registering “impressions” in legible words and sentences is almost impossible in Venice, where
even the prospect of dashing off a letter interrupts the beauty of his moment-to-moment
experiences:
But in truth Venice isn’t in fair weather a place for concentration of mind. The
effort required for sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, and the brightest page
of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your milieu. All nature beckons you
forth and murmurs to you sophistically that such hours should be devoted to
collecting impressions. Afterwards, in ugly places, at unprivileged times, you can
convert your impressions into prose. Fortunately for the present proser the
weather wasn’t always fine; the first month was wet and windy, and it was better
to judge of the matter from an open casement than to respond to the advances of
persuasive gondoliers. (Italian Hours 17)
Yet for James and for Jamesian characters, including Hyacinth, a letter is a record of the
correspondent’s present-tense experience. Even if the articulation of a letter isn’t what the
“proser” might desire, it conveys immediacy more vividly than first- or third-person narratives.
For the epistolary spontaneity that Hyacinth and that James describe through the word
“impressions” suggests an un-self-consciousness impossible within first- or third-person
retrospectives, and even within free indirect discourse. Epistolary accounts of ineffability have,
historically, documented Italophiles’ struggles to represent exigencies both private and public,
whether fictional (such as Amy Dorrit’s or Milly Theale’s), nonfictional (such as Margaret
Fuller’s or Effie Ruskin’s), or texts that resist either category (especially Jameson’s Ennuyée).237
237
Hyacinth’s “ineffable” mood echoes writers from the 1820s to the 1850s, but his “impressions” echo, too, the
rhetoric of fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In the “Conclusion” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Walter Pater
argues that a person experiences beautiful things most vividly as “impressions,” and that when one experiences life
from moment to moment and from impression to impression, there isn’t time to translate “consciousness” into
346
For many of these Anglo-American correspondents, ineffability transcends the contents
of the letters. It exaggerates a politicoaesthetic temperament that characterizes “impressions” of
Italy writ large: ineffability, in fact, appears as a metatextual trope for Anglo-American desires
to write about Italy with fresh impressions and with fresh words. Indeed, if Hyacinth’s claim to
wordlessness is in part a reaction to the sheer volume of letters left by his historical predecessors,
then his ineffability exaggerates a convention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelogues:
having and describing “impressions” in the wake of previous travellers’ spectrely accounts.
Hyacinth is self-conscious about the fact that the Princess has experienced the “spirit” he cannot
yet put into words. While it is new to him, this newness will likely seem naïve to her, since she’s
already experienced Venice firsthand: “‘you will easily understand,’” he tells the Princess,
“‘why here, especially here, the spirit should move me’” (The Princess Casamassima 394). By
claiming lassitude, especially decadent lassitude, as the defining feature of his Venetian sojourn,
Hyacinth reinscribes a Grand-Tour rite of passage: polite deferral to the past. Yet Hyacinth’s
lingering moodiness also exaggerates the anxiety that characterizes the rest of the letter. When
he tells the Princess that this letter may be the “last” one he writes from the continent, his tone
reveals his predisposition toward imminent change. Hyacinth clearly realizes he can no longer
escape the psychological trauma attending his uncertain political identity when he leaves Venice
and returns to London and to Hoffendahl. The urgent tone of the letter intimates, then, that his
time in France and in Italy has affected the way he thinks and feels, even though his newly
altered “spirit” remains crucially inarticulable.
legible words and sentences. Pater idealizes this illegible state of mind, which blurs physical and metaphysical
transcendence through visceral descriptions. For him, a “quickened, multiplied consciousness” also blurs existing
theories of the beautiful that separate feeling from thinking and subjectivity from objectivity (153). Hyacinth, then,
embodies decadent epistemology. Indeed, if we are to read Hyacinth’s regard for “impressions” as perverse (and
this letter as his turn from politics to aesthetics), then The Princess Casamassima is a damning criticism of Paterian
aesthetics as much as it is a realist depiction of anarchist or socialist politics. For a fuller discussion of Hyacinth’s
Paterian worldview, see Meissner.
347
Yet if the form of the letter suggests Hyacinth’s Romantic inheritance, then the content
reveals the manner in which his worldview is suffused with readings of Schopenhauer, Emerson,
and Ruskin. By alluding to these politicoaesthetic figureheads in his letter to the Princess,
Hyacinth shows how he’s not just a bookbinder; he’s a reader. Still, this fusion of nineteenthcentury philosophy also suggests that Hyacinth’s ambivalent worldview is a product of his
piecemeal—and yet unreconciled—education. Having visited a fountain in the campo, Hyacinth
imagines “the first settlers,” who fled from Aquileia to Venice. Hyacinth skips over the fountain
itself, though, and focuses attention on the historical associations it inspires in him. For
Hyacinth, this anecdote is significant because it shows how he understands Venice through
associative “impressions” that superimpose past- and present-tense human experiences.
“‘Observe how much historical information I have already absorbed,’” he boasts to the Princess
(394). Hyacinth’s anecdote about “the first settlers” isn’t “historical information” as much as it
is impressionistic, because his vision of these people alongside the fountain is unique within his
singular consciousness. For as “ineffable” as Hyacinth’s “impressions” may be, it’s clear that
this letter is a measured response to Venice, one he uses to legitimize his historical understanding
of the world. Ultimately, Hyacinth’s description isn’t about the fountain or his historical
imaginings that take place near the fountain: it’s an excuse for him to remind the Princess of his
own exceptional mind. Hyacinth’s in-situ education shouldn’t “surprise” the Princess, he
contends, “‘for [she] never wondered at anything after [she] discovered [he] knew something of
Schopenhauer’” (394).
When the Princess realizes that Hyacinth has read Schopenhauer early in their
relationship, she is, in fact, “surprised.” For if she is drawn to him for his rarefied taste, she
assumes his interest in beautiful things is almost instinctive, and she also assumes his working-
348
class education wouldn’t have exposed him to Schopenhauer or the other philosophers, including
Emerson and Ruskin, to whom Hyacinth alludes much more subtly. Hyacinth’s reference to
Schopenhauer is shorthand for his exceptional working-class cultural capital, but it is also
shorthand for the way he reads—and misreads—Venetian poverty. “‘I assure you,’” Hyacinth
writes the Princess, “‘I don’t think of that musty misogynist [Schopenhauer] in the least to-day,
for I bend a genial eye on the women and girls I just spoke of, as they glide, with a small clatter
and with their old copper water-jars, to the fountain’” (394). Hyacinth’s language suggests that
this reference to Schopenhauer is unrelated to the rest of the sentence. By dismissing his
familiarity with Schopenhauerian philosophy he shows how he can be cavalier about his bookish
education, and he turns to a description of “the women and girls” he sees outside his window
near St. Mark’s Square. Hyacinth’s description of these women and girls seems, however, to be
a direct response to Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the beautiful.
It’s impossible to know what Schopenhauer Hyacinth has read, but his vague interest in
the philosopher is important, especially since the bookbinder has already defined himself by his
vagueness and by his politicoaesthetic ambivalence. According to Schopenhauer, people are
motivated by the fundamental desire to live (Wille zum Leben), and he argues that this will is the
primary cause of human suffering (xxix). Aesthetic contemplation offers us a respite, if just a
temporary respite, from suffering, he argues, because it allows us to forget that this world is a
mere object of perception. During moments of aesthetic contemplation, we become one with
perception itself, an idea Emerson and Pater revived later in the nineteenth century.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the beautiful is a tempered critique of Kantian and Hegelian
aesthetics, since he believes beautiful things allow a person to transcend objectivity and to
become a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge”: “he who is sunk in this
349
perception is no longer individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself”
(Schopenhauer 231). In the third Critique, Kant outlines an appreciation of the beautiful
predicated on “disinterest”: a person looking at a “thing-in-itself” may understand it to be
beautiful, but the thing is still beautiful, Kant argues, whether the person does, or doesn’t, realize
it. Schopenhauer shares Kant’s premise that this world is an objectivity reality. For
Schopenhauer, however, aesthetic contemplation is meaningful because it allows us to escape the
suffering that necessarily ensues from our consciousness, especially our self-consciousness, of
this inescapable “disinterest.” Hyacinth’s description of Venetian poverty shows how he
internalizes the problem of his own subjectivity and, simultaneously, remains ambivalent about
what the other people he sees are thinking and feeling. Hyacinth’s letter notes the people and the
art he has seen while touring Venice, but it is less a study of people themselves or art itself than
it is a Schopenhauer-inspired meditation on ambivalent subjectivity. Indeed, if he believes that
aesthetic contemplation is a temporary escape from human suffering, then it’s telling that his
aesthetic contemplation is defined by the human suffering he sees through his Venetian window.
Hyacinth’s description of “the women and girls” shows how he sees Venetians as
impersonal abstractions, especially since he dwells on the beauty of their poverty:
‘The Venetian girl-face is wonderfully sweet and the effect is charming when its
pale, sad oval (they all look under-fed) is framed in the old faded shawl. They
also have very fascinating hair, which never has done curling, and they slip along
together, in couples or threes, interlinked by the arms and never meeting one’s
eye (so that its geniality doesn’t matter), dressed in thin, cheap cotton gowns,
whose limp folds make the same delightful line that everything else in Italy
makes.’ (394)
350
“‘The Venetian girl-face’” is, for Hyacinth, a type or a composite of ideas he associates with
femininity in this place, and it suggests that all of these people look the same to him. In fact, the
definite article in “‘The Venetian girl-face’” and the body-part-by-body-part blazon render
Hyacinth’s description an almost anthropological study. His elision between the singular (“girlface”) and the plural (“they” populate the canal “in couples or threes, interlinked by the arms”) is
significant because it shows how “they” are abstractions to him. Grammatically, he moves from
one woman to women much more generally, but by the end of the passage, the women don’t
even seem real: they resemble “the same delightful line that everything else in Italy makes”
(394). By comparing the “pale, sad oval” “girl-face” to an abstraction—a line—Hyacinth
renders the women art objects. He doesn’t see these people as people. Instead, “they” are
things. Next to Hyacinth’s references to Schopenhauer, this dehumanizing meditation on
Venetian beauty (“its” face, not “her” face or “their” faces) seems particularly loaded. For if
Schopenhauer critiques Kant, arguing that this tendency toward “disinterested” beauty is
dangerous when it renders people things, then Hyacinth’s appreciation of Schopenhauer seems to
be misguided.
Hyacinth’s description of “‘[t]he Venetian girl-face’” is part of a larger meditation on
poverty, and “they” become embodiments of the beauty he sees in the city’s ruin. Inside his
room near St. Mark’s Square, he hears “‘women and girls, with shawls on their heads and their
feet in little wooden shoes which have nothing but toes, pass in and out’” (394). Hyacinth
conveys his sense of Venetian disintegration through synecdoche: the “wooden shoes” are only
“toes”; the rest of the shoes are worn, and the people are too poor to repair them (394). Though
Hyacinth claims to feel “deeply demoralised,” his disappointment lies in the incongruity between
his abstractions and the reality of the place (395). Moreover, Hyacinth’s interest in the worn
351
“toes” of the “shoes” is hardly empathetic. That he closes the letter by discussing his own
poverty (and his self-consciously outrageous spending) and mentions Venetian hunger obliquely
(he admits that “‘they all look under-fed’” parenthetically) intimates the naïve egotism at the
heart of his character and even at the heart of his commitment to “the people.”238
While many Anglo-American travellers had to come to terms with the fact that
contemporary Italian people are not just subjects of paintings or subjects of sculptures, Hyacinth
seems to forget that they are human beings when he travels to Venice. His experiences are
reminiscent of two or three generations past, not only because of his Kantain/Schopenhauerian
aesthetics, but also because hunger would have recalled images of Venice during the 1840s and
the 1850s, when the city was recovering from Risorgimento occupation. Hyacinth’s
preoccupation with the figures’ hungry bodies suggests an anthropological distance from their
present-tense circumstances. In fact, he fails to understand that Italian people exist beyond the
paintings and the sculptures of the past:
‘I have seen none of the beautiful patricians who sat for the great painters—the
gorgeous beings whose golden hair was intertwined with pearls, but I am studying
Italian in order to talk with the shuffling, clicking maidens who work in the bead-
238
Stuart and Boudreau discuss Hyacinth’s treatment of Venetian hunger by comparing descriptions in The Princess
Casamassima to descriptions in Italian Hours. Both critics discuss the fact that this novel fictionalizes Venetian
moments we see elsewhere in James’s fiction and nonfiction from the period (especially the first, second, and third
essays included in Italian Hours, which were first published in 1882, 1892, and 1873 respectively). While Stuart
reads the travelogue as strict memoir, Boudreau argues that the narrator of Italian Hours bridges James’s fictional
and nonfictional personae, and she cautions us against reading these impressions as the author’s own. “His passion
for the suffering poor is of a piece with his passion for beautiful women,” Boudreau writes, “for artistic treasures of
the past, for his own exquisitely bound books, and for the private sentiments they immortalize. When he feels with
the working poor, his feelings are not at all in conflict with the political forces his associates believe will carry the
day, though those feelings, of course, do not rule out affections for other things that are not so eagerly embraced by
‘the democracy’” (100). Because Stuart reads the narrators of The Princess Casamassima and Italian Hours as
biographical impressions, he argues that James realized the extent of Venetian poverty from a well-heeled distance.
This inflects Stuart’s reading of Hyacinth: “What is the person who finds beauty in poverty, who discovers that the
oppression of the people has in turn allowed for the creation of immortal and immortalizing works of art, to do about
his revolutionary sympathies? Hyacinth now realizes that in order to maintain this sacred, symbolic immortality one
must sometimes sacrifice one’s own life and sometimes even the lives of others” (35).
352
factories—I am determined to make one or two of them look at me. When they
have filled their old water-pots at the fountain it is jolly to see them perch them on
their heads and patter away over the polished Venetian stones.’ (395)239
Hyacinth’s detachment may be most clear when says that he has no interest in learning the Italian
language except to speak to the “girls” who work in the bead-factories. This detail suggests
Hyacinth’s perverse interest in working-class women. For him, “they” are objets d’art.
In fact, it’s almost as if Hyacinth imagines the “maidens” who work in the “beadfactories” to exist on “stones” that are real (they are standing on cobbled streets) and are, at the
same time, Ruskinian projections of what Venice is and how Venice has been built. Hyacinth’s
tongue-in-cheek repetition of “stones” throughout the letter shows how he, like many tourists,
sees Venice through iconography that made Ruskin’s armchair guidebook The Stones of Venice
(1851–1853) famous. According to Hyacinth, the “maidens” who work in the “bead-factories”
239
In Italian Hours, James describes the bead-makers and the bead-sellers in language that anticipates Hyacinth’s:
“young girls with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expression, with splendid heads of hair and
complexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes
that click as they go up and down the steps of the convex bridges” (30–31). The closeness between James’s
“nonfictional” (Italian Hours) and the “fictional” (The Princess Casamassima) descriptions recalls the resemblance
between Hawthorne’s French and Italian Notebooks and The Marble Faun. James bemoans the tourist-ridden
underbelly of the canals and the piazzas in “Venice,” where he pities the tourist, whom he addresses with secondperson pronouns, for having to endure the cosmopolitan “barbarians” who have travelled to the watery city: “you
have looked repeatedly at every article in every shopwindow and found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians
who sell bead-bracelets and ‘panoramas’ are perpetually thrusting their wares at you” (15, 11). James’s caricatures
of the bead-makers and the bead-sellers in Italian Hours and in The Princess Casamassima extend a cultural
stereotype made famous by Gautier. John Auchard is one of many critics who emphasizes the importance of
Gautier’s Italia (1852) to James’s Italian Hours. Gautier parodies an anonymous “American savage” who has
amassed a collection of “colored glass beads” (195). Strands of glass beads were quintessential Venetian souvenirs
for many nineteenth-century travellers, and their accounts of these bead-makers and bead-threaders become crucial,
if disappointed, rites of passage. For instance, in a letter dated 3 December 1849, Effie Ruskin writes to her mother,
“On Saturday we rowed to Murano, an island about 20 minutes sail from here…. It is now nearly deserted but the
Cathedral is extremely interesting and the island for several centuries has been chiefly celebrated as being the seat of
Manufactories for the famous Venice glass, which amongst other merits broke in pieces when poison was put into it.
One Manufactory entirely for beads we went over…. All sizes and colours are made but always of the same form.
They are cheap. I got an immense bunch of all colours for 2/6 but they were very small ones. I have ordered some
red of a peculiar kind and extremely beautiful and much more expensive to make into necklaces for Sophie, Alice &
Eliza [Jameson]. I will get pretty clasps for them at Genoa where they work gold so beautifully” (Ruskin, Effie in
Venice 79). Ruskin updates the letter before mailing it, and she writes, “The man brought the red beads from
Murano last night but I find in daylight that they are not nearly so pretty, therefore I must get the children something
else and I do not know what has become of the things for I do not see a single thing worth bringing so far” (83).
353
“patter away over the polished Venetian stones,” and the city itself seems, then, to be paved in
bead-like or gem-like stones (395). Later, Hyacinth tells the Princess, “‘It won’t be for you,
however, in this case, to cast the stone at me; for my demoralisation began from the moment I
first approached you’” (395). Hyacinth’s “demoralisation” is, as much as the “stones,” a
Ruskinian convention, for the thesis of the book is that the Renaissance has ruined Venice: “the
dying city” is, Ruskin writes, “magnificent in her dissipation, and graceful in her follies,” and
she “obtained wider worship in her decrepitude than in her youth, and sank from the midst of her
admirers into the grave” (Ruskin 40). It’s no wonder, perhaps, that James referred to this book
as “demoralised prose” in Italian Hours (8). At the end of “The Quarry,” Ruskin pits the
Renaissance against the Gothic he loved so much. In this moment, he transforms the “stones” in
the title into Arnoldian “touchstones” for his generation of art historians:
if I should succeed, as I hope, in making the Stones of Venice touchstones, and
detecting, by the mouldering of her marble, poison more subtle than ever was
betrayed by the rending of her crystal; and if thus I am enabled to show the
baseness of the schools of architecture in nearly every other art, which have for
three centuries in Europe, I believe the result of the inquiry may be serviceable for
proof of a more vital truth than any at which I have hitherto hinted. (Ruskin
33)240
240
This had been the final sentence in the final paragraph in the 1851–1853 version of “The Quarry.” Because
Hyacinth would have been familiar with one of Ruskin’s later “travellers’” editions of The Stones of Venice, I’ve
quoted from the fourth impression (1886) of the “travellers’” edition (the first of which was published in 1879).
James discusses his distaste for these “travellers’” editions in “Venice,” which he first published in Century
Magazine in 1882 and then republished in Italian Hours in 1909. He was particularly irritated with the
“introductory chapters and local indices” Ruskin advertises in the revised title: In “Venice,” James writes that this
“queer late-coming prose of Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue of the Stones of Venice, only one
little volume of which has been published, or perhaps ever will be) is all to be read, though much of it appears
addressed to children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an
angry governess. It is, however, all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully just. There is an inconceivable want
of form in it, though the author has spent his life in laying down the principles of form and scolding people for
354
Though Ruskin’s argument about the Gothic is famous, his language in the conclusion to “The
Quarry” is decidedly vague, for he refuses to call the Renaissance the Renaissance. Indeed, the
very name seems to be unutterable. Like Hyacinth’s “stones,” Ruskin’s twinned “stones”/
“touchstones” exist both as real things and as conceits: they are the very foundations of the
streets and the buildings across the Venetian landscape, and they are also ruins that materialize
forgotten histories of bricklayers and stonemasons.
Hyacinth’s language is, then, suffused with Ruskin. The “stones” he mentions collapse
his half-hearted interest in Ruskinian ideas with his half-hearted interest in developing an
appreciation for Venetian things: the beads, the stones, the glass on which the city’s history is
predicated. Even the “maidens” from the “bead-factory” are Ruskinian embodiments.
Hyacinth’s “bead-makers” seem, at first, to substantiate Ruskin’s famous argument about the
Gothic in The Stones of Venice: that this style, unlike the Renaissance, actualizes laborers’
spiritual potential. In “The Virtues of Architecture” Ruskin writes,
The man who chose the curve and numbered the stones had to know the times and
tides of the river, and the strength of its floods, and the height and flow of them,
and the soil of the banks, and the endurance of it, and the weight of the stones he
had to build with, and the kind of traffic that day by day would be carried on over
his bridge, all this especially, and all the great general laws of force and weight,
and their working; and in the choice of the curve and numbering of stones are
expressed not only his knowledge of these, but such ingenuity and firmness as he
departing from them; but it throbs and flashes with the love of his subject—a love disconcerted and abjured, but
which has still much of the force of inspiration” (James, Italian Hours 8). “Among the many strange things that
have befallen Venice,” James continues, “she has had the good fortune to become the object of a passion to a man of
splendid genius, who has made her his own and in doing so has made her the world’s. There is no better reading at
Venice, therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every true Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chaff. The
narrow theological spirit, the moralism à tout propos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in
a mountain of flowers” (8).
355
had, in applying special means to overcome the special difficulties about this
bridge. There is no saying how much wit, how much depth of thought, how much
fancy, presence of mind, courage, and fixed resolution there may have been to the
placing of a single stone of it. This is what we have to admire,—this grand power
and heart of man in the thing; not his technical or empirical way of holding the
trowel and laying mortar. (39–40)
According to this logic, the laborers who made famous Venetian bridges and cathedrals
embodied a forgotten way of thinking, feeling, and working that Ruskin associates with the
medieval period. For Ruskin, the bricks and the stones materialize a sacred “presence of mind”
realized by these laborers. Because Ruskin envisions the bridges and the cathedrals to be
“touchstones” of a spirit that is, he argues, in ruin, he remembers the laborers for their virtuous
enlightenment, not for their “technical or empirical way of holding” their tools (40). When
Hyacinth returns to London and to his bookbinding, he seems to wonder whether the other
bookbinders embody this Ruskinian spirit. “What struck him most,” James writes, “after he had
got used again to the sense of his apron and bent his back a while over his battered table, was the
simple, synthetic patience of the others, who had bent their backs and felt the rub of that dirty
drapery all the while he was lounging in the halls of Medley, dawdling through boulevards and
museums, and admiring the purity of the Venetian girl-face” (James, The Princess Casamassima
404). Still fascinated by “the Venetian girl-face,” Hyacinth doubts whether the other
bookbinders’ “simple, synthetic patience” matches his revivified sensibility. For if Hyacinth
fancies himself Ruskin’s ideal laborer, then the other bookbinders seem, in comparison, “simple”
for their “technical or empirical” interest in their work.
356
Unlike bricklayers and stonemasons, bead-makers are not to be admired for their “fancy,”
their “presence of mind,” their “courage,” or their “fixed resolution,” because beads are useless
and because they don’t represent the same inspirited way of thinking and feeling (Ruskin 39). In
“The Nature of Gothic” Ruskin writes,
Glass beads are utterly unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed
in their manufacture. They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods;
these rods are chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand,
and the fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the
rods sit at their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and
exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail.
Neither they, nor the men who draw out the rods or fuse the fragments, have the
smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young lady,
therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more
cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavouring to put down. (166)
Ruskin distinguishes, though, between the human worth of “glass beads” and the human worth of
“glass cups and vessels,” by arguing that “cups and vessels” require “invention” on the part of
the artisan, while “beads” do not. Like the first half of the paragraph about bricklayers and
stonemasons, the paragraph about bead-makers focuses attention on manual labor. For Ruskin,
of course, the work of one’s hands isn’t as meaningful as the work of one’s mind (thus, the turn
in the paragraph about layers and masons). When he describes the superiority of “glass cups and
vessels” to “glass beads,” Ruskin turns, again, from the hand to the mind: “glass cups and
vessels may become the subjects of exquisite invention; and if in buying these we pay for the
invention, that is to say, for the beautiful form, or colour, or engraving, and not for mere finish of
357
execution, we are doing good to humanity” (166).241 Ruskin doesn’t describe the person who
makes the cups and vessels; instead he suggests the manner in which the person who buys the
cups and vessels is able to commune with the artisan’s very mind when he or see sees the object
itself.242
Hyacinth’s descriptions of the bead-makers in The Princess Casamassima are, tellingly,
set outside the factory, where the sound of their clicking and clacking shoes on the stones
appears as a substitute for the sound of their moving, bead-filled hands. His meditation on their
beauty is neither a tactile nor a spiritual one. It’s defined, instead, by a strange impersonality
even Ruskin’s descriptions of the bricklayers, the stonemasons, and the bead-makers transcend.
Yet Ruskin wasn’t the only writer to memorialize Venetian bead-makers’ work. Vernon Lee’s
“The Bead-Threader’s Funeral” (1908) may be an empathetic revision of Ruskin’s bead-maker,
who appears as a mindless or soulless laborer; Lee’s bead-threader is person with a life beyond
glass, thread, and manual labor. While Ruskin dismisses the bead-maker as a person who cannot
think or feel the same things as a stonemason, Lee’s vignette elegizes a bead-threader “who
made bead garlands for cemeteries” (97). Far from being empty of mind and soul, the beadthreader appears as a ghost to the travelling narrator, who sees the dead girl’s funeral procession
as it crosses the lagoon from Venice to Murano.
Rather than focusing attention on the fact that this girl’s life was defined by sepulchral
labor, and rather than suggesting that this image is a fitting one, Lee’s imagined remembrance of
the bead-threader is a meditation on her interior world. The sight of the dead body passing by
her is, for Lee, an occasion to consider the other girls who string bead garlands for cemeteries:
241
These quotations about glass beads, glass cups and vessels, and bead-makers do not appear in the 1851–1853
edition of “The Nature of Gothic.” Ruskin included them in the later editions of The Stones of Venice, which he
published during the 1870s and the 1880s.
242
This particular point—about the difference between bead-makers and cup- and vessel-makers—would have been
appealing to Hyacinth, an avid reader of Schopenhauer. 358
these “little makers of glass-bead garlands, even when they die of consumption at nineteen” had
“perhaps been happy and made others happy” (99). Indeed, at the end of the vignette, Lee turns
her attention from the funeral to “the other young women who continue cutting the rods of
coloured enamels, threading the heaps of beads all day” (100). Like Hyacinth’s “clattering”
bead-makers, Lee’s “clattering” bead-threaders embody the promise of human life, even human
life that may be far from dignified. “A small girl,” Lee writes, “clattering in her clogs with the
rapid crossings and bob-genuflexions of her persuasion, ran up to the chancel benches, plopped
down to a hasty prayer, clattered and bobbed and crossed herself, head erect, unabashed—the
incarnation of the democratic human needs” (101).
Ultimately, if Hyacinth’s “maidens” are an appropriation of the Ruskinian conceit, then
the letter is a reading, a misreading, or even a parody of The Stones of Venice, just as it is a
misguided interpretation of Schopenhauer. Hyacinth intimates that he, too, wants to see
“democratic human needs” in these maidens. His subtle references to Ruskinian stones and
Ruskinian laborers are meaningful, then, because they hint at Hyacinth’s vexed
identification/disidentification with working-class people throughout his time in Venice: he both
does and doesn’t internalize the serious meaning of their artisanship. While he is a bookbinder,
he thinks of himself a reader as much as he thinks of himself as an artisan, just like the
bricklayers and the stonemasons Ruskin passionately described over thirty years before.
Hyacinth’s interest in the “maidens,” figures whose work balances hand and mind, shows how he
is absorbed with the people about whom Ruskin seems to have felt most ambivalent. In fact,
Hyacinth’s seeming elision between the “maidens” and the bricklayers and the stonemasons is
significant, because Ruskin’s ideas about laborers were becoming more and more nuanced
during this period. Between 1851–1853, when he first published The Stones of Venice, and
359
1879, when he published the first travellers’ edition of the book, Ruskin’s understanding of
Venetian politics and aesthetics became increasingly ambivalent in many ways, even as his
arguments about the dignity of labor gained influence among Victorian activists. For this reason,
the paragraphs about the glass-workers demonstrate a counter-intuitive air of elitism: technical
labor may be dignified, but only when the laborer is a conduit for Ruskin’s own ideas about
“doing good to humanity” (166). Hyacinth’s interest in the “maidens” shows how he reads,
misreads, or parodies Ruskinian subjects but also the moral potential that Ruskinian subjects are
supposed to embody. While looking out the window of his room near St. Mark’s Square, he
worries his own work isn’t “doing good to humanity.” Hyacinth’s impersonal admiration of the
“maidens” from the “bead-factories” prefaces this confession about the spiritual meaninglessness
of his own work. These side-by-side realizations are, then, ambivalent in the Ruskinian spirit.243
Hyacinth’s reading/misreading of The Stones of Venice fictionalizes James’s own
complicated history with Ruskin. In Italian Hours, he collects three Venetian essays, one written
in 1873, one in 1882, and one in 1892, but he reprints them achronologically: 1892, then 1882,
then 1873. Together, they reveal James’s shifting allegiances to Ruskin—and to Ruskinian
ideas—over twenty years.244 In the first Venetian essay he praises Ruskin, and Ruskin, in turn,
praised James among Anglo-American intellectual circles. Ruskin even recommended James for
the Slade Professorship at Oxford University. By 1882, however, when James published the
243
Jeanne Clegg and Tamara Follini have addressed James’s revisions of Ruskinian iconography. Though they
don’t discuss the “stones” or the “maidens” from the “bead-factories,” their interpretations of Ruskinian conceit in
James’s work may be useful in this context. For as Clegg argues, while “Ruskin put his intricate metaphors to
political uses, his intentions are no impediment to another great prose stylists’ working them for other purposes:
which could be what James ultimately did with Ruskin’s Venice” (170). Follini notes that this often tongue-incheek appropriation has become a popular, if fraught, topic in intertextual studies of Ruskin and James. She argues
that it should be read as meaningful cultural commentary: “Clegg has argued persuasively, in examining the
symbolism of James’s novels, that even in his disagreements with Ruskin a dialogue with his opinion is evident;
Jonathan Freedman has noted how, as James’s relation with Ruskin unfolds, ‘a constant impatience with his
rhetoric’ is accompanied by ‘a deepening sympathy with his project. Certainly Ruskin’s formulations and questions
circulate and surface continually in James’s writing” (366).
244
James collected and reprinted his essays in 1909, forty years after he first toured Venice; thirty-five years after
he first published “Venice,” where he praised Ruskin; and nine years after Ruskin died.
360
second Venetian essay, he had become much more critical of Ruskin. In fact, R. W. Martin calls
“Venice” a “gentle tirade” that denies “the extent to which Ruskin’s views are reflected in essays
that, though written earlier, follow it in the volume” (109). When James returns to Ruskin again
in 1892, his critique of Ruskin is much more tempered, and, Martin argues, this is because James
had come to terms with his own authority as a writer, especially as a Venetian writer. The 1909
editorial process represents, then, a crucial reckoning for James, who seems to have lost faith in
Ruskin or in the Ruskinian spirit of his own work during the mid 1880s, when he wrote The
Princess Casamassima.245
While it would be irresponsible to trace direct parallels between James and Hyacinth, it’s
significant that he experiences a crisis in his politicoaesthetic worldview during his Venetian
sojourn, and that he articulates this crisis through Ruskinian language. When James confesses
his irritation with Ruskin, who seemed to be out-of-touch with the people living in present-tense
Venice in 1882, he suggests that Ruskin isn’t interested in nineteenth-century laborers, and he
also suggests Ruskin condescends to his own working-class readers who were, for the first time
in history, able to afford Venetian travel.246 Hyacinth also struggles to square his allegiances to
working-class exigencies with his allegiances to the theories of beauty that transformed Venice
for Anglo-American tourists when he describes the people “shuffling” over the Gothic “stones”
(James, The Princess Casamassima 395). In fact, when Hyacinth returns to London, the narrator
reveals that “[Lady Aurora] now conversed with him on the subject of his foreign travels; he
found himself discussing the political indications of Paris and the Ruskinian theories of Venice,
245
A number of critics have compared James’s varying treatments of Ruskin and of Ruskinian ideas among the
1873, the 1882, and the 1892 essays. Follini’s précis of the Ruskin-James relationship is the most nuanced: James,
she contends, was never a one-dimensional “devotee of Ruskin’s taste” (365). For fuller discussions, see Martin,
Clegg, Hendin, Auchard, Stuart, and Follini.
246
For Ruskin, Clegg argues, “the abyss between past and present could only be bridged by such eccentric symbolic
devices as the people of Sheffield electing a Doge, or adopting the Republic’s law on the sale of fruit and
vegetables, or building a Ducal Palace. James looks for (slightly) less peculiar forms of Venetian continuity” (168).
361
in Belgrave Square, quite like one of the cosmopolites bred in that region” (427). Like many
travellers who experienced Venice for the first time in the 1870s and the 1880s, Hyacinth visits
the city in the wake of mid-century revolutions (the French Revolution, the Italian Risorgimento,
and the American Civil War) and increased middle-class tourism (which, many have pointed out,
was a result of these wars).
Indeed, the Venice Hyacinth sees is different from the Venice Ruskin or James first saw
during their inaugural visits to the city in 1835 and in 1869, respectively. By 1886, Venice had
already been part of the Kingdom of Italy, which became the Italian Republic five years later, for
twenty years. The “stones” Hyacinth describes in his letter to the Princess had withstood a
change in architectural vogue from the Gothic to the Renaissance, but they had also withstood a
less abstract deterioration during the spring of 1848, when Austrian troops bombarded the city by
air balloon, shelling the bridges and the cathedrals. From his post-Risorgimento vantage point,
Hyacinth would have had to reconcile two Ruskins: the art historian of the 1840s and the 1850s
and the social philosopher who came of age, intellectually, in the decades following Italian
Unification. “James’s Venice,” Josephine Gattuso Hendin writes, “is a city viewed through his
reading of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice and his own enthusiasm for the city as a work of art” (82).
Yet Hendin argues that this city also “embodies the power of art and architecture to resist the
tides of nature and even of rising secularism and social unrest” (82). Ultimately, it’s in Venice
that Hyacinth comes to terms with his personal unrest, as well as his commitments to political
unrest in London; and it’s only after he’s seen the post-Risorgimento landscape that he finally
interrogates the meaning of his vow to Hoffendahl.
For if we read Ruskin’s corrective inclusion of the “bead-makers” in his 1879 travellers’
edition as representative of his altered politicoaesthetic disposition, then we can understand how
362
The Stones of Venice evolved from its original 1851–1853 edition to its later iterations in the
1870s and the 1880s. Indeed, Ruskin didn’t just supplement his original work with new
drawings, new plates, and “local indices”; the revised edition also shows how his very ideas
changed across the period. For one thing, he’d become much more sympathetic to the cause for
Italian Unification. When he and Effie travelled to Venice in 1849 in the wake of recent airballoon raids, his allegiances lay mainly with Austria. Read as Ruskinian allusions,
consequently, the “maidens” from the “bead-factories” embody deep changes in the
philosopher’s politicoaesthetic temperament. Yet these maidens’ association with beads may
also be an allusion to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s meditation on moods. Emerson’s “Experience”
(1844), a meditation on grief prompted by the death of his son, famously compares moods to
beads strung on an “iron wire,” a simile that shows how a person comes to understand his or her
experience of a particular moment by isolating his or her “moods” one by one: “Life is a train of
moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses
which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in focus” (309).
“Temperament,” Emerson continues, “is the iron wire on which the beads are strung” (310).
Emerson’s simile celebrates the manner in which one’s temperament is changeable, for the
individual beads substantiate the fragility one’s moment-to-moment moods. James seems to
have had Emerson’s “beads” in mind when he discusses Hyacinth’s “bewilderment” in the
“Preface” to The Princess Casamassima. James compares “pearls” to “feelings” “strung” across
various “threads” (James, The Princess Casamassima 39). Hyacinth’s moody treatment of the
“maidens” from the “bead-factories” echoes both the historic-moment-to-historic-moment
changes and the immediate-moment-to-immediate-moment changes Ruskin and Emerson
associate, respectively, with beads. Moreover, his brief meditation on these maidens marks a
363
crucial turn in the letter from his inward reflections about his immediate Venetian surroundings
to his larger crisis about his involvement in Hoffendahl’s plot.
Hyacinth’s decadent effusions suggest that he fancies himself a Grand Tourist.247 Given
Hyacinth’s bookbinding profession, as well as his involvement in Hoffendahl’s revolutionary
circle, though, he likely experiences Venice as many first-time, middle-class tourists did. Vetch
tells Hyacinth that Pinnie’s deathbed wish was for him to “‘go abroad and see the world,’” and,
not surprisingly, she wanted him to see Paris, where his grandfather and his mother were born
(374). “Hyacinth,” James writes, “had turned pale at this suggestion, and for a moment he said
nothing. ‘Ah, Paris!’ he murmured, at last” (374). His decision to see Venice is even more
ambivalent. “‘She would have liked you even to take a little run down to Italy,’” Vetch tells
Hyacinth, but there is no other reference to the city until he arrives there (374). Hyacinth’s
ambivalent treatment of Italy and of Venice is especially strange, since, as John Auchard reminds
us in his introduction to Italian Hours, “Venice, more than Florence or even Rome, was the goal
of the Grand Tour during the nineteenth century, and most travelers did something to prepare
themselves for its wonders” (xxi). Hyacinth is only able to see Paris and Venice, though,
because of the modest inheritance Pinnie leaves him upon her death: thirty-seven pounds.
Melchiori, consequently, dubs Hyacinth’s “small inheritance” the “deus ex machina of the
Victorian novel,” since it allows him “to leave his trade as a bookbinder in Soho and to spend a
holiday soaking himself in the culture and traditions of the past” (128). Tanner similarly argues
that Hyacinth’s “small bequest enables him to take a trip to Europe before he has to commit his
fatal deed, and there his dissatisfaction and disassociation—emancipation as he might feel it—
from revolutionary politics (from politics tout court really) is completed” (175). Still, Malashri
247
Lal, Melchiori, Tanner, Seaton, Stuart, and Kent Puckett are among the critics who discuss Hyacinth’s trip to
Paris and to Venice in terms of a Grand Tour.
364
Lal reminds us that this trip is predicated on an “attraction” to “the past that only aristocratic
wealth would have made possible” (17). Hyacinth’s Grand Tour, then, may be the only way
Hyacinth fulfills his nickname, the “little aristocrat,” or his father’s well-heeled English
pedigree.
Yet once he arrives in Venice, even Hyacinth cannot ignore the fact that this Grand Tour
is fleeting, in part because he doesn’t have the money to sustain months of travel. “‘I am very
happy—,’” Hyacinth writes to the Princess, “‘happier than I have ever been in my life save at
Medley—and I don’t care for anything but the present hour. It won’t last long, for I am spending
all my money’” (James, The Princess Casamassima 395). Hyacinth’s claim that this place has
instilled in him an appreciation for “the present hour,” which he plans to spend “listening to
music and feeling the sea-breeze blow in between the those two strange old columns” of St.
Mark’s Square, is also a claim about the edification of his character (395). This newly acute
interest in Venetian history—and his immediate experiences at these sites—binds his Grand Tour
to those of other mid-century, middle-class travellers. In novels of manners by writers such as
Hawthorne, Eliot, Lee, and James, as we have seen, proper interest in historicity often marks the
quality of one’s coming of age, a process defined by a person’s ability to make moral as well as
intellectual discriminations. For middle-class travellers, these discriminations constituted an
education, or the appearance of an education, crucial to their experience abroad.
For if travel in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries was defined by the Grand
Tour’s gentrified itinerary, then the period from the late 1840s to the 1870s and the 1880s marks
a new era when travel became much more democratic.248 The Grand Tour had been a
gentleman’s rite of passage before the mid-nineteenth century. Since moral and aesthetic or
248
For a thorough discussion of The Grand Tour’s trajectory across the long nineteenth-century, see James Buzard’s
“A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the ‘Europe’ of Nineteenth-Century Tourists” and The Beaten Track:
European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918.
365
artistic tastes were to be most properly developed abroad (one had to understand art in its place),
only people wealthy enough to travel could understand historicity in situ. Ruskin’s The Stones of
Venice came into vogue just as the middle class could, finally, afford to see Italy in person, and,
therefore, it popularized the idea that this kind of education could be accessible to the masses.
Though Ruskin later abandoned many of his early arguments on behalf of democratized art and
art historical appreciation, his regard for human understanding (of buildings, of cathedrals, but
also of medieval laborers) became a touchstone for writers across the second half of the
nineteenth century, whose rhetoric likewise demonstrates a self-conscious concern for seeing
Italian people as people. In The Princess Casamassima, of course, Hyacinth struggles to
reconcile the factory workers with the expectations of women in sculptures and paintings.
Hyacinth’s Venetian sensibility—vexed, as we have seen, in this Ruskinian spirit—exaggerates
the experiences of many middle-class travellers, who often found themselves in Italy with grand
expectations and with a lingering sense of discontent in the face of Venice’s material realities.
By 1886, Hyacinth and his compatriot Anglo-American travellers would have been
familiar with a new culture of middle-class travel that put common people face to face with
European Continental art, a phenomenon to which James returns in a later Venetian novel, The
Wings of the Dove (1902). Both novels trace characters’ struggles to assimilate the Grand Tour
into a new tradition. In The Wings of the Dove, Milly Theale’s face-to-face experience of
Italianate art—the Titians and the Turners at the National Gallery and especially the Bronzino
portrait at the Matchum Estate—affects the understanding she has of herself as a person just as
Hyacinth’s unfulfilled visions of “the beautiful patricians” does. While studying the ladycopyists at the National Gallery, Milly claims to realize, fleetingly, what it means to know “the
right way to live” (176). Her understanding suggests that this “right way to live” connects an
366
appreciation for good art and for the people who make good art to moral goodness. Milly’s
epiphany about “the right way to live” recurs throughout the rest of the novel. The existential
meanings she attaches to the lady-copyists at the National Gallery haunt her Venetian
experience, which is defined, like Hyacinth’s, by her money (Kate Croy and Merton Densher
pretend to love Milly in order to inherit her money when she dies) and by her yearning to
experience “fine things.”249
Like Kate, Merton, and Milly, Hyacinth finds himself in St. Mark’s Square among
gawking hoards of travellers from England and America. Hyacinth seems to understand, at least
bookishly, that “the right way to live” has a twofold meaning: “right” means to have cultivated
the proper moral taste and the proper aesthetic or artistic taste. Kent Puckett, in fact, argues that
this obsession with twofold rightness is central to James’s narrative logic: “The right
intelligence, an intelligence neither too sharp nor too dull, remains for James a necessary but
impossible ideal, something ‘charming, tormenting, eternal’” (60). Hyacinth is, he contends,
“the appropriate center,” because he is “neither too smart nor too stupid” (60). Puckett’s point is
especially true of Hyacinth’s Grand Tour, because it is the only part of the novel he narrates
himself. As we will see, Hyacinth’s letter to the Princess also turns to questions about how good
art does or doesn’t inspire moral goodness in Hoffendahl, the revolutionary figure he has, until
now, most admired. Hyacinth’s interest in “fine things” is, then, a self-legitimizing posture for
the Princess, who idolizes him for his innate artistic and aesthetic but also his innate moral
sensibilities. Hyacinth’s distaste for “anything but the present hour” shows how the idealism
249
Like The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove depends upon a letter mailed from Venice. When she
learns, just as she’s dying, that Merton loved her, or pretended he loved her, with the hope of inheriting her fortune
and marrying Kate, Milly writes him a letter, willing him the money. Milly’s letter never appears in the text of the
novel, for Merton is so overwrought with guilt that he burns it. Milly’s letter is narratively censored, then, just as
Hyacinth’s is.
367
defining his aesthetics (influenced by Schopenhauer, Emerson, Ruskin, and even Pater) and his
politics (influenced by Hoffendahl) are also shaped by mid-century exigencies. Indeed, the 1848
revolutions in France and, it seems, in Italy haunt his own political allegiances, even if they’re
filtered through other people’s (Eustache Poupin’s and Hyacinthe Vivier’s) real or otherworldly
experiences. Still, his emphasis on the fleeting quality of the ideal present moment or the ideal
present hour contrasts with his worry about money at the end of this paragraph. Hyacinth’s
impulsive contentment here recalls his impulsive commitment to Hoffendahl earlier in the novel.
Ultimately, Hyacinth’s attempt to square bookish ideals—revolutionary aesthetics, revolutionary
politics—with the economic realities governing Italy at the fin de siècle is governed by his
moment-to-moment impressions as much as they are by his vast education.
For Hyacinth, the moody pivot between happiness and unhappiness abroad seems to rest
not only on the problem of his monetary philandering, but also on a crisis of identity that this
place inspires in him. For if this is, in fact, a Grand Tour, then he should be learning something,
specifically something about what it means to be a “little aristocrat.” Having come to appreciate
the “fine things” that govern life in Venice, Hyacinth eventually articulates a subtle distaste for
his work—political work—and admits that he dreads his return home to London. Venice is a
place where first- and third-person and present- and future-tense versions of Hyacinth’s “very
self” may be reckoned:
‘When I have finished this [letter] I shall go forth and wander about in the
splendid Venetian afternoon; and I shall spend the evening in that enchanted
square of St. Mark’s, which resembles an immense open-air drawing-room,
listening to music and feeling the sea-breeze blow in between those two strange
old columns, in the piazzetta, which seem to make a portal for it. I can scarcely
368
believe that it’s of myself that I am telling these fine things; I say to myself a
dozen times a day that Hyacinth Robinson is not in it—I pinch my leg to see if
I’m not dreaming. But a short time hence, when I have resumed the exercise of
my profession, in sweet Soho, I shall have proof enough that it has been my very
self: I shall know that by the terrible grind I shall feel my work to be.’ (395)
Tellingly, this part of the letter describes experiences that have not yet taken place, and it
anticipates foregone conclusions about things Hyacinth expects to have realized once the letter
has been sealed and mailed to the Princess. The shifts between future-, future-perfect-, and
present-tense verbs exaggerate Hyacinth’s curiously premonitory mood: he writes about Venice
with a certainty for what he will think, what he will feel, and who he will be; but he hasn’t yet
experienced the place that will affect these things within his “very self.”
Indeed, the shifts from first- to third-person perspectives may be even odder than the
shifts in verb tenses. While the letter shows how Hyacinth tries to describe his “ineffable
impressions” of “these fine things,” the self-circling sentences lead him, rather, to confess an
existential abstraction, one that ignores the “things” themselves in favor of a momentary
understanding of individuality (a nod, again, to Schopenhauer) (394, 395). James underlines this
narratological paradox (the words in the letter are both personal and impersonal) through
language that insinuates Hyacinth’s egoistic hedonism: “it’s of myself that I am telling these
fine things” (394–395). Though Hyacinth claims to be worried about the “telling” of “ineffable
impressions,” his language in this moment seems self-consciously oblique (395, 394).
Hyacinth’s “telling” is confusing in part because the genitive “of myself” is confusing. He is
telling “of himself” (not “to himself” but “of himself”), a fact that shows how he curates his
singularity through the grammar in the letter. Hyacinth’s language is self-isolating, circling
369
further and further inward, rather than addressing the Princess. The narrative becomes even
more disorienting when he replaces the familiar first-person pronoun “I” with his own complete
name, “Hyacinth Robinson,” at the end of the sentence. The shift from first- to third-person
perspectives exaggerates the manner in which Hyacinth both associates and disassociates himself
from his immediate subject, a meditation on St. Mark’s Square.
Hyacinth’s exuberant interiority in this paragraph is, then, at odds with the otherwise
distant quality of his Venetian narrative. For if this letter reveals the innermost workings of
Hyacinth’s mind, it also demonstrates his tendency to censor or self-censor his experiences
through overwrought rhetoric, James’s cross-century gesture to philosophers as various as
Schopenhauer, Emerson, Gautier, Ruskin, and Pater. A self-proclaimed inheritor of
Schopenhauerian and Ruskinian aesthetics, Hyacinth refuses to claim a fixed identity.
Moreover, his indeterminate grammar—affected shifts from first- to third-person pronouns and
present- and future-tense verbs—recall the “quickened, multiplied consciousness” in the
“Conclusion” to Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which famously celebrates the
manner in which an appreciation for the beautiful impresses upon us “that strange, perpetual,
weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (153, 152). Indeed, Hyacinth’s repeated negations—“not
in it,” “not dreaming”—emphasize that this novel is about an otherwise self-affirming character
who revels in unrealized action (James, The Princess Casamassima 395). Ultimately, the letter
is less a study of “these fine things” than it is an epistemological crisis documented as narrative
ephemera—it is a text within a text—in a novel concerned with people bound uncomfortably to
the material exigencies of their very moment.
Still, what does he mean when he says to himself “that Hyacinth Robinson is not in it,”
not just once, but again and again, “a dozen times a day” (395)? The phrase “a dozen times a
370
day” suggests that this restless disposition constitutes his hourly existence. Just as it leads him to
idealize or romanticize Venice, it also leads him to idealize or romanticize world-weariness as a
productive mode of thinking, feeling, and being. For Hyacinth, being “in it” or “not in it” is
shorthand for a lingering state of restlessness through which he comes to understand his own
politicoaesthetic allegiances, one that links him to Miriam, Kenyon, Dorothea Brooke, Roderick
Hudson, and even Madame Krasinska. Hyacinth’s world-weariness, then, binds two
characteristics of mid-century Italian expatriatism that have been read independently of one
another: the first characteristic is political ambivalence (or, in Hyacinth’s case, half-hearted
allegiance to a cause he does not truly understand) and the second is the peculiar lassitude
governing artistic- or aesthetic-minded people in this place.
Hyacinth’s lassitude is most exuberant toward the end of the letter, when he turns to his
reservations about being involved in Hoffendahl’s plot. This is the most famous passage, for
when Jamesians discuss the letter, most discuss Hyacinth’s turn to the Veronese toward the end,
and they often understand—and, I argue, oversimplify—Hyacinth’s interest in the painting as a
turn from politics to aesthetics. To be sure, right before his ode to the Veronese and to the
Doge’s Palace, Hyacinth confesses that he’s become ambivalent about his work on behalf of “the
people,” and he assures the Princess that she is not responsible for his hesitations: “‘I don’t
mean to pretend that it’s all your fault if I have lost sight of the sacred cause almost altogether in
my recent adventures’” (396). Still, most critics overlook Hyacinth’s confession that this Grand
Tour from London to Paris and to Venice has instilled in him “a sense of everything that might
hold one to the world, of the sweetness of not dying” (393). Strangely, if this is, as Tanner
argues, a “premature suicide note,” Hyacinth overturns a Grand Tourist convention: for all of his
lassitude, he reverses the death-in-Venice convention by reneging his vow to Hoffendahl. “‘You
371
can’t call me a traitor,’” Hyacinth urges, “‘for you know the obligation that I recognise’” (396).
Hyacinth’s epiphany isn’t, then, an easy choice between politics and aesthetics, though the art he
sees in Paris and especially in Venice has a revivifying affect on him: “‘The monuments and
treasures of art, the great palaces and properties, the conquests of learning and taste, the general
fabric of civilisation as we know it, based, if you will, upon all the despotisms, the cruelties, the
exclusions, the monopolies and the rapacities of the past, but thanks to which, all the same, the
world is less impracticable and life more tolerable—’” (396). Indeed, the only specific piece of
art and the only specific artist that he mentions, Veronese, reveal that politics and aesthetics are
bound together in this final disavowal of Hoffendahl.
Hyacinth’s defense of the Veronese in the Doge’s Palace may be the most overwrought
passage in the letter, for it shows how he contrasts his own regard the integrity of art with
Hoffendahl’s supposed disinterest in art. Hyacinth critiques Hoffendahl’s commitment to
redistribution, since such to-the-letter redistribution won’t actually provide things to eat and
places to live for “the people”; and this logical fallacy may be why he doesn’t consider himself a
traitor to these people. Hyacinth describes Hoffendahl’s understanding of the Veronese and the
Doge’s Palace in the conditional mood:
‘He would cut up the ceilings of the Veronese into strips, so that every one might
have a little piece. I don’t want every one to have a little piece of anything, and I
have a great horror of that kind of invidious jealousy which is at the bottom of the
idea of a redistribution. You will say that I talk of it at my ease, while, in a
delicious capital, I smoke cigarettes on a magenta divan; and I give you leave to
scoff at me if it turns out that, when I come back to London without a penny in
my pocket, I don’t hold the same language. I don’t know what it comes from, but
372
during the last three months there has crept over me a deep mistrust of that same
grudging attitude—the intolerance of positions and fortunes that are higher and
brighter than one’s own; a fear, moreover, that I may, in the past, have been
actuated by such motives, and a devout hope that if I am to pass away while I am
yet young it may not be with that odious stain upon my soul.’ (396–397)
Hyacinth’s meditation on the Veronese does, in fact, mark a turning point. It’s not, however, as
simple as a choice between politics and aesthetics. Instead, this passage represents a
politicoaesthetic hypothetical in which he shows how he has internalized one of the major tenets
of Grand Tourism: there is, for Hyacinth, a “right” place, in the Ruskinian sense of the word, for
the Veronese, and there is also a “right” place for one to see the Veronese: the Doge’s Palace is
just as important as the painting to Hyacinth’s burgeoning sense of historicity. Hyacinth realizes
that this kind of regard for the Veronese—within the Doge’s Palace—likely separates him from
Hoffendahl and from the other revolutionaries in his middlebrow London circle.
Hyacinth recognizes that Hoffendahl wouldn’t understand his in situ appreciation of the
Veronese or the Doge’s Palace. In fact, he imagines Hoffendahl would remove the Veronese
from the Doge’s Palace and tear it into pieces which would be sent here and there across the
European Continent, recalling Napoleon’s pillaging during the French Revolution less than a
century earlier. Hyacinth’s horror at the thought that this city would find its masterpieces
shredded to pieces and sent to disparate cities may be based, in fact, on his knowledge of
nineteenth-century history. Hoffendahl seems to have a Napoleon complex from Hyacinth’s
perspective, at least in this hypothetical vision of the Veronese in the wake of a successful
revolution. The idea of tearing the Veronese into strips is unthinkable to Hyacinth, who, like
many Anglo-American tourists, came to understand Italy as an Arcadia: the source of art, the
373
source of art history, and the place where paintings and sculptures belonged. Critics who argue
that this novel is James’s ode to liberalism or to conservatism have often mentioned the
Veronese—even just as a passing reference—in order to interpret how James addresses the
anarchist or the socialist question of redistribution. Most often, they assume Hyacinth poses the
Veronese hypothetical as a placeholder for much more plausible redistribution “plots.”
Consequently, many read Hyacinth’s hypothetical (from much more plausible redistributions to
this specific act, destroying the Veronese and the Doge’s Palace) as the perverse extrapolation of
an overwrought aesthete. Such discussions tend to emphasize Hyacinth’s and Hoffendahl’s
twinned irrationalities: how or why does Hyacinth even fathom such a desecration? And is it
really a desecration when people are starving across the European Continent, in London, in Paris,
and in Venice? Or how would Hoffendahl’s parceling of the Veronese provide a meaningful
redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor? One critic even wonders whether Hyacinth’s,
or James’s, hypothetical desecration may be read as a fictionalization of contemporary terrorist
acts in London that took place while he was drafting The Princess Casamassima?250 Yet such
interpretations neglect the possibility that this letter is a meditation on the Veronese itself, since
they rarely consider what The Triumph (or The Apotheosis) of Venice (1585) actually narrates.
For if the painting, like the letter, is a text within a text, Veronese’s narrative subject is
crucial to our understanding of Hyacinth’s altered politicoaesthetic disposition. It is, in fact, a
strange painting within Veronese’s canon, because it illustrates a secular, not a religious, story.
The Triumph of Venice is a historiographic painting:
250
For representative interpretations of the Veronese and the Doge’s Palace in The Princess Casamassima, see
Howe, Kimmey, Martin, Melchiori, Hendin, Nussbaum, Jenkins, Stuart, Follini, Valtet-Comet, and Boudreau.
Kimmey, Hendin, and Stuart suggest that this moment shows how Hyacinth pits politics and aesthetics against one
another. Trilling, Nussbaum, and Jenkins read it as an imagined pawn for the anarchist or the socialist movement
Hoffendahl represents. Among those critics who read Hyacinth’s, and thus Hoffendahl’s, hypothetical as
implausible are Melchiori and Jenkins; Stuart likewise interrogates the logic of the letter, and he argues that tearing
the Veronese into strips wouldn’t even be a meaningful act of redistribution.
374
Rising above a bank of clouds, the royally garbed Venice sits enthroned between
the twin towers of the city’s Arsenal, about to be crowned with laurel by flying
victories. Arrayed at her feet and offering her wise counsel are personifications of
peace, abundance, fame, happiness, honor, security, and freedom. An especially
splendid triumphal arch, fronted by twisting columns, marks the top of an
enormous balcony which accommodates the multitudes of celebrating people
stipulated in the commission. At the base, Venice’s smiling subjects seem
undisturbed by the enormous size and energy of careening horsemen in their
midst, reminders of Venice’s considerable military might. The same illusionistic
devices that Veronese had used on the ceiling at the Villa Barbaro here take on
monumental dimensions, serving to give political allegory a previously
unimagined dynamism and visual excitement. Masking the realities of a slow and
inevitable decline in Venice’s fortunes throughout the sixteenth century, The
Apotheosis of Venice and other works like it helped to sustain the city’s
independence and triumphalist self-imagining well into the eighteenth century.
(Paoletti and Radke 429)
The Veronese, like the other paintings in the Doge’s Palace, serves as a mnemonic for
Venetians’ independent history, from the Renaissance to Risorgimento. During this postRisorgimento moment, of course, the Doge’s Palace would be a testament to what many,
including Ruskin, called the Venetian fall. The fact that this painting is in the Doge’s Palace
itself is a landmark for the Republic: it was the seat of Venetian governance from 1340 (when it
was first rebuilt) to 1797 (when Napoleonic occupation displaced authority from the Doge to the
375
soon-to-be Emperor of France).251 Indeed as early as the sixteenth century, authorities who
commissioned Veronese and Tintoretto to paint the inside of the Doge’s Palace, and their
paintings were to glorify Venetian civic life. When “fires in the Doge’s Palace in 1574 and 1577
necessitated the wholesale renovation of its pictorial decoration,” Paoletti and Radke note,
“artists received explicit instructions about subject and even composition, the idea being to
emulate the visual authority of the destroyed works as closely as possible” (428). Ultimately, the
Veronese and the Doge’s Palace are crucial for Hyacinth, whose commitment to Hoffendahl
seems to have primed his nascent interest in Venetian historicity.
While Hyacinth’s interest in historicity may be understated in his letter, James’s
description of the Veronese in Italian Hours shows how the Doge’s Palace was, for him, an
architectural ode to Venice’s storied legacy. For him, the Gothic stones, the Renaissance
paintings, and the present-tense experience of beauty render it “the loveliest thing in Venice”
(25). The description of the Veronese in Italian Hours is jarringly different from the one in The
Princess Casamassima, since it describes the painting itself:
All the history of Venice, all its splendid stately past, glows around you in a
strong sea-light. Every one here is magnificent, but the great Veronese is the
most magnificent of all. He swims before you in a silver cloud; he thrones in an
eternal morning. The deep blue sky burns behind him, streaked across with milky
bars; the white colonnades sustain the richest canopies, under which the first
gentlemen and ladies in the world both render homage and receive it. Their
251
Auchard notes that this history must have inflected James’s understanding of Venice, as early as his first 1869
tour: “The decline may be dated from the abdication of the last Doge, the collapse into Austrian rule in 1797, and
into the Napoleonic ‘Regno Italico’ in 1805. By 1866, when Venice was annexed by the newly formed Kingdom of
Italy, its days as a world power were over and, after a thousand years of growth and independence, it shifted toward
eternity, linked itself to the mainland with the railroad from Mestre, and began to linger on as the expensive jewel of
tourism that it remains today” (xviii).
376
glorious garments rustle in the air of the sea and their sun-lighted faces are the
very complexion of Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics and
religion, of art and patriotism, gives a splendid dignity to every scene. (25)
Read together, the descriptions from The Princess Casamassima and Italian Hours tease us into
reading Hoffendahl’s hypothetical redistribution as revisionist history: what Hyacinth imagines,
then, is the possibility that this Republic would be parceled, as it in fact was, to various nations
and various states across the European Continent. Indeed, James, or the Jamesian narrator of
Italian Hours, cranes his neck upward and describes the “magnificent” ceiling to his armchair
compatriots. He becomes, via Veronese, a casual historian. He remembers the bygone republic,
reflected in the gold-framed panels above, for post-Risorgimento tourists, who may not have
seen Triumph or Apotheosis in their own present-tense experiences of the city.
Hyacinth’s concern that this painting would become fodder in Hoffendahl’s plot would
have been particularly fraught, then, especially if we don’t just read it as a placeholder for
anarchist or socialist redistribution. In the wake of the Risorgimento, Hoffendahl’s parceling of
the Veronese, a historiographic metonym for the Doge’s Palace and for Venetian authority much
more generally, recalls Italy’s century-long struggle to unify states that had been governed by
other European nations, including France and Austria, for centuries. Italian Unification, which
incorporated Venice in 1866, created a single Italian nation-state from what had been disparate—
foreign occupied—regions. Austrian Chancellor, Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich
infamously called Italy “une expression géographique” in a letter to the Austrian ambassador to
France in 1847. Metternich, of course, had been in attendance at the Congress of Vienna in
1814, when European leaders negotiated the parceling that gave rise to many of the midnineteenth-century revolutions.
377
Hyacinth’s vision of Hoffendahl tearing the Veronese, piece-by-piece, and redistributing
it outside the Doge’s Palace and outside Venice may have been, in fact, far from ridiculous. It
may be, in fact, a savvy interpretation of nineteenth-century revolutionary history through a
sixteenth-century painting. Still, even if Hyacinth’s interest in the parceled fragments shows
how he has an appreciation for Venetian historicity, it’s revealing that Veronese’s narrative, like
Hoffendahl’s “plot,” remains largely unrepresentable. Indeed, just as the Risorgimento is the
ultimate unnarratable for Miriam and for Kenyon in The Marble Faun, the aftermath of the
Risorgimento, which Hyacinth seems to see inscribed in the Doge’s Palace, may only be
discernable through its conspicuous absence. Indeed, Hyacinth’s shows just how self-conscious
he is of the ideas Hoffendahl’s unspeakable persona inspires in him: “‘You know how
extraordinary I think our Hoffendahl (to speak only of him); but if there is one thing that is more
clear about him than another it is that he wouldn’t have the least feeling for this incomparable,
abominable old Venice’” (396). By the end of the letter, Hyacinth realizes that unlike
Hoffendahl, who “‘wouldn’t have the least feeling’” for Venice, he has learned to feel, and to
feel intensely, and he realizes that this place cannot be made subject to Hoffendahl-esque
revolutionaries, who make both people and art subjects of radical parceling.
Once Hyacinth returns to London, it’s clear to Poupin and to Paul, almost immediately,
that his fervor for Hoffendahl’s plot has “cooled.” Hyacinth’s confession to the Princess is not
just a momentary shift in allegiances from politics to aesthetics. Instead, he has completely
altered his worldview. Paul is, as much as Vivier, a spectre in the Paris chapter, for when
Hyacinth arrives in France, he is still mortified that Paul allowed him to commit his life to a plot
he didn’t fully understand. Yet even as James describes Hyacinth brooding over Paul’s betrayal,
he shows how Hyacinth is still drawn to Paul’s even-temperedness. “Muniment’s absence of
378
passion, his fresh-coloured coolness, his easy, exact knowledge,” James writes, “constituted a
group of qualities that had always appeared to Hyacinth singularly enviable. Most enviable of all
was the force that enabled him to sink personal sentiment where a great public good was to be
attempted and yet keep up the form of caring for that minor interest” (391). Poupin, Paul, and
the Princess each recognize a “coolness” in Hyacinth when he returns from Paris and Venice to
London. Hyacinth’s “coolness” seems to be a response to what he’s seen abroad and how what
he’s seen has changed him as a person. It’s clear he recognizes the magnitude of his Parisian and
his Venetian experiences, and as he struggles to articulate to the Princess how he’s changed, he
contrasts his waning commitment to Hoffendahl with the temperate Mediterranean climate:
“‘The weather is splendid and I roast—but I like it; apparently, I was made to be spitted and
‘done’, and I discover that I have been cold all my life, even when I thought I was warm’” (394).
Yet if Hyacinth realizes that he was “cold” before leaving London for Venice, then Paul, Poupin,
and the Princess understand that his revolutionary fervor has “cooled” in the wake of his Grand
Tour. From their perspective, Hyacinth doesn’t seem to have committed himself afresh to a new
“plot” or a new “people”; instead, he seems to have become apathetic.
Yet even Poupin senses that this new disposition isn’t just a post-Grand-Tour malaise, for
when he realizes Hyacinth never used the letters of introduction he’d written to his 1848
compatriots, he feels both embarrassed and slighted. Poupin worries Hyacinth has internalized
fundamental yet undefinable conflicts in his various allegiances. “‘You are cooling off, my
child,’” Poupin tells Hyacinth, “‘there is something about you! Have you the weakness to flatter
yourself that anything has been done, or that humanity suffers a particle less? Enfin, it’s between
you and your conscience’” (405). Hyacinth and Paul have a similar conversation, and though
Hyacinth insists he’s still committed to “the people,” Paul asseverates that this commitment is
379
tainted: “‘You, my boy? You’re a duke in disguise, and so I thought the first time I ever saw
you. That night I took you to Hoffendahl you had a little way with you that made me forget it; I
mean that your disguise happened to be better than usual’” (445). Paul’s taunt is a spectrely
foreshadowing. For when Hyacinth receives a letter from Hoffendahl at the end of the novel, it
is a summons to kill “the Duke” (591). Just as Pinnie obliquely reminds Hyacinth of his
aristocratic heritage through his nickname, the “little aristocrat,” James suggests, through Paul’s
insult, that this summons may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Still, Paul’s “coolness” is different from the self-cultivated “coolness” Poupin ascribes to
Hyacinth once he returns from the continent. While Paul’s “coolness” may be a backhanded
compliment for mannerisms Hyacinth sees in Paul’s day-to-day, even-tempered, and duplicitous
“form,” Hyacinth’s “coolness” reflects a deep inward struggle to reconcile past- and presenttense versions of himself.252 For once he has travelled to Paris and to Venice, he realizes his
commitment to Hoffendahl’s plot oversimplifies conflicts he recognizes within his “very self”:
his grandfather’s legacy versus his father’s; his impulsive avowal, and then disavowal, to
Hoffendahl’s “plot”; and even his often difficult friendships with Paul, Poupin, and the Princess.
Hyacinth’s “coolness” is, then, a euphemistic shorthand among James’s characters for what I’ve
called politicoaesthetic ambivalence, since it describes a way of thinking and feeling that is
otherwise unarticulated in the dialogue or the narrative of the novel. Ultimately, “coolness” is a
euphemism for Hyacinth’s efforts to put politics and aesthetics in conversation with one another
and for Hyacinth’s efforts to come to terms with his misguided humanitarian desires. James
252
Elizabeth Barrett Browning also uses the word “cool” to describe the ambivalence she experiences during 1848,
the unnarrated period between parts one and two of Casa Guidi Windows (1851). In a letter to Miss Mitford, dated
10 October 1848, Barrett Browning writes, “As to the war, it is painful to feel ourselves growing gradually cooler
and cooler on the subject of Italian patriotism, valour and good sense. The child’s play between the Livornese and
our Grand Duke provokes a thousand pleasantries. Every now and then a day is fixed for a revolution in Tuscany,
but up to the present time a shower has come and put it off. Two Sundays ago, Florence was to have been ‘sacked’
by Leghorn, when a drizzle came and saved us. You think this is a bad joke of mine or an impotent sarcasm
perhaps; whereas I merely speak historically” (Letters 386).
380
attributes Hyacinth’s self-conscious “cooling” to his continental sojourn, and he emphasizes that
this disposition is characterized by “vague” associations with the continent: “All this took the
form, sometimes, to his imagination, of a vast, vague, dazzling presence, an irradiation of light
from objects undefined, mixed with the atmosphere of Paris and of Venice” (445–446). Indeed,
France and Italy suffuse the rest of the novel and become shorthand for Hyacinth’s ambivalence
long before his Grand Tour.
In fact, The Princess Casamassima is populated with a number of Italianate characters
from James’s first Italian novel, Roderick Hudson: the Prince and the Princess Casamassima and
Madame Grandoni. The Prince and Princess, of course, bear his family’s aristocratic history
through their respective titles. Madame Grandoni, who is German, still claims Rome as her
spiritual homeland, and she talks elliptically about her identification, and her disidentification,
with Hyacinth’s commitment to “the people” through references to “the basso popolo” or “the
povera gente” (240). While readers interested in connections between Roderick Hudson and The
Princess Casamassima tend to emphasize Christina Light’s metamorphosis, few note Madame
Grandoni’s presence in both novels. Madame Grandoni’s place in both novels’ romantic
triangulations is crucial, for she articulates the men’s—Roderick’s, Hyacinth’s, and the
Prince’s—lassitude in Christina’s wake as decidedly Italian crises.
Toward the middle of the novel, the Prince tries to visit the Princess in her London home,
but she refuses to see him, and Madame Grandoni receives him instead. This drawing-room
crisis is made all the more dramatic since Hyacinth tries to visit the Princess the very same night,
and he appears in the drawing room just as the Prince is leaving. In fact, the Prince and Hyacinth
meet face-to-face, and their encounter prompts Madame Grandoni to address the Princess’s
working-class co-mingling with the Prince. While Madame Grandoni is reluctant to spell out the
381
Princess’s interest in Hyacinth to the Prince—she believes her friend has jilted him openly,
whether her relationship with Hyacinth is, or isn’t, a romantic one—the Prince forces her to
elucidate why she has secluded herself from him in London and why she won’t see him, even
when he comes to her. Ultimately, this conversation about the Princess’s interest in workingclass people is inseparable from her choice to distance herself from her aristocratic—specifically,
her Italian aristocratic—inheritance. Madame Grandoni intimates, finally, that even if the
Princess is slumming among London’s working-class (embodied by Hyacinth) she finds these
people to be noble compared to her husband’s family:
Madame Grandoni wondered for a moment whether she had not better tell him (as
it would prepare him for the worst) that his wife cared about as much for his name
as for any old label on her luggage; but after an instant’s reflection she reserved
this information for another hour. Besides, as she said to herself, the Prince ought
already to know perfectly to what extent Christina attached the idea of an
obligation or an interdict to her ill-starred connection with an ignorant and
superstitious Italian race whom she despised for their provinciality, their
parsimony and their tiresomeness (she thought their talk the climax of puerility),
and whose fatuous conception of their importance in the great modern world she
had on various public occasions sufficiently covered with her derision. The old
lady finally contented herself with remarking, ‘Dear Prince, your wife is a very
proud woman.’ (239)
The conversation is punctuated by awkward silences on her part and on his. Finally, however,
Madame Grandoni urges the Prince to understand that this marriage may be effectively over. For
Madame Grandoni realizes that the Princess cannot reconcile her burgeoning—albeit self-
382
aggrandizing—interest in the poor with her Italian husband, his Italian “name,” or his Italian
“traditions” (239). “‘Understand this—understand this,’” she stutters, in frustrated empathy,
“‘Christina will never consider you—your name, your illustrious traditions—in any case in
which she doesn’t consider, much more, herself!’” (239).
Madame Grandoni’s deepest allegiances are to the Princess. Indeed, she appears as a
maternal figure to Christina in Roderick Hudson long before Christina meets and weds the
Prince, and before she becomes the heroine of her own eponymous novel. Yet Madame
Grandoni also empathizes with the Prince, whom the Princess seems to forget once she travels
from Rome to London. Through her emphasis on the Prince’s “name” and “illustrious
traditions,” Madame Grandoni intimates that the disintegration of the Casamassima marriage is a
casualty of the fallen Italian aristocracy. It is also, then, a casualty of the post-Risorgimento
economic devastation she would have witnessed in Italy during the 1870s (when Roderick
Hudson was written) and the 1880s (when The Princess Casamassima was written). Madame
Grandoni’s reluctance to speak to the Prince on behalf of the Princess, coupled with this subtle
reference to the fallen Italian aristocracy, suggests that this disintegration is hushed for personal
and for political reasons that are inextricably bound to one another. James’s references to postRisorgimento Rome and Venice are ever-present, even if they are muted, then, throughout The
Princess Casamassima. Not only do they inflect Hyacinth’s Ruskinian study of the beadmakers’ torn shoes; they also inflect Madame Grandoni’s polite references to the Princess’s
disenchantment with the Prince and with the Casamassima “name.”
Concerned for his wife’s integrity in his absence, the Prince begs Madame Grandoni to
promise not to leave the Princess. While Madame Grandoni feels responsible for the Princess,
she will not stay with her if the Princess “‘were to do certain things’” (238). “‘I can’t say what
383
things,’” Madame Grandoni continues, obliquely; “‘It is utterly impossible to predict on any
occasion what Christina will do. She is capable of giving us great surprises. The things I mean
are things I should recognize as soon as I saw them, and they would make me leave the house on
the instant’” (238). Still, the Prince argues that Madame Grandoni “‘might interpose’” or that
she “‘might arrest’” the Princess “‘if anything of the kind [. . .] should happen” (238). Madame
Grandoni and the Prince never spell out what “things”—unspeakable “things”—they fear the
Princess may “do.” Halfway through their conversation, their mutual vagueness becomes a joke
for Madame Grandoni and for the Prince, who double-check the implicit meanings of one
another’ codewords through an analogy about the Roman ghetto. “‘You must have been in
Rome, more than once, when the Tiber had overflowed, è vero?’” Madame Grandoni asks the
Prince, familiarly; “‘What would you have thought then if you had heard people telling the poor
wretches in the ghetto, on the Ripetta, up to their knees in liquid mud, that they ought to
interpose, to arrest?’” (238). Madame Grandoni’s hypothetical—she is a poor woman telling the
other poor woman, presumably the Princess, how to rescue herself from her flooded house—is
ironic because both Madame Grandoni and the Prince are worried about the Princess’s
unspeakable involvement in working-class agitation. By displacing the Princess’s impolite
humanitarian desires from the London slum to the Roman ghetto, Madame Grandoni abstracts
the issue (the Princess isn’t just among the poor; she is poor), but she also shows how the
Princess’s interest in “the poor wretches” may be about Italy as much as it is about England, and
class warfare much more generally.
The conversation between Madame Grandoni and the Prince is predicated on mutual—if
unstated or understated—assumptions about the Princess’s regard for the working class. Yet his
language shows how these assumptions may be loaded with historical meanings even Madame
384
Grandoni cannot begin to fathom. “‘Capisco bene,’” the Prince tells Madame Grandoni,
“dropping his eyes. He appeared to have closed them, for some moments, as if a slow spasm of
pain were passing through him” (238). Yet if the Prince does understand Madame Grandoni’s
intimation that the Princess is embarrassed by him and by his family, then he is confused by her
interest in working-class people. Ultimately, the hypothetical Madame Grandoni poses to
obscure the Princess’s strange interest in the poor isn’t really a hypothetical, and that unnerves
the Prince, who realizes her coy folly. “‘I can’t tell you what torments me most,’ he presently
went on, ‘the thought that sometimes makes my heart rise into my mouth. It’s a haunting fear.’
And his pale face and disturbed respiration might indeed have been those of a man before whom
some horrible spectre had risen” (238). “‘You needn’t tell me,’” Madame Grandoni returns, “‘I
know what you mean, my poor friend’” (238).
Within the logic of their conversation, unspeakable “things” have double meanings: the
confessions of what can and can’t be assumed (“‘I can’t say what things,’” “‘I can’t tell you,’”
and “‘You needn’t tell me’”) and the elisions between such euphemisms and the “things” that
actually remain ineffable in the conversation itself. The Prince’s “horrible spectre” may be his
family, just as it is Hyacinth’s. Indeed, if Madame Grandoni’s drawing-room scene is an
awkward triangulation that places her between two of the Princess’s most fervent admirers, then
it is uncanny that both the Prince and Hyacinth find themselves reckoning their families’ legacies
through her interest in “the people.” The Prince may be devastated by the Princess’s uncanny
commitment to “the people,” but he’s also heartbroken by the fact that she is too proud to
entertain him (because his “name” signifies wealth, even if that wealth depreciated in the
aftermath of the Italian Risorgimento) in the London drawing room he’s provided for her far
from Rome and the rest of his family.
385
Just as Hoffendahl’s plot is the unarticulable writ large within the narrative of The
Princess Casamassima, poverty, especially Italian poverty, remains taboo for the Prince. When
he realizes the Princess has devoted her time to Hyacinth and to working-class people he never
even sees, he feels humiliated. “‘It is the common people that please her,’” Madame Grandoni
explains, “with her hands folded on her crumpled satin stomach and her humorous eyes raised to
his face” (240). “‘It is the lower orders,’” she clarifies, “‘the basso popolo’” (240). Yet even
after Madame Grandoni’s comparison between the London slum and the Roman ghetto, and even
after her disambiguation, the Prince seems dumbfounded: “‘The basso popolo?’ The Prince
stared, at this fantastic announcement” (240). Madame Grandoni clarifies, again in Italian:
“‘The povera gente,’ pursued the old lady, laughing at his amazement” (240). “‘The London
mob—,’” the Prince stutters, “‘the most horrible, the most brutal—?’” (240). “‘Oh,’” Madame
Grandoni coyly affirms, “‘she wishes to raise them’” (240). Madame Grandoni’s subtle elisions
between English and Italian words intimate the manner in which English and Italian movements
for the people become euphemisms for one another—and for unspeakable “plots” and
unspeakable “things” throughout the novel. It’s as if the basso popolo and the povera gente
become, like Hyacinth’s Venetian “coolness,” euphemisms for private crises that are to remain
secreted, even within James’s narrative.
Madame Grandoni’s conversation with Hyacinth is equally illuminating, for she
historicizes the dangers of his nascent commitment to Hoffendahl’s “plot” through her own
ambivalent national or transnational identity. Madame Grandoni receives Hyacinth just after the
Prince leaves the Princess’s drawing room, and it’s clear she’s thinking about 1848 when she
sees him. Her references to the Princess’s vexed Italian inheritance are, with Hyacinth, as vague
as they are with the Prince: “‘I want to warn you a little, and I don’t know how. If you were a
386
young Roman, it would be different’” (242). “‘A young Roman?’” Hyacinth asks (242).
“‘That’s where I live, properly, in Rome,’” she explains (242). This conversation recalls one
Madame Grandoni and Hyacinth have early in the novel, when she explains her cosmopolitan
heritage: “‘But I am not Italian—ah no!’ the old lady cried. ‘In spite of my name, I am an
honest, ugly, unfortunate German. But it doesn’t matter. She, also, with such a name, isn’t
Italian, either. It’s an accident; the world is full of accidents. But she isn’t German, poor lady,
any more’” (193). Even though Madame Grandoni claims that she isn’t, “properly” from Rome,
her conversations with the Prince and with Hyacinth reveal that this place has defined her
worldview. In fact, she confesses that Hyacinth’s involvement in present-tense revolutions
reminds her of the Spring of Nations, bridging her histories in Germany and in Italy:
‘I gathered the other night that you are one of the young men who want
everything changed—I believe there are a great many in Italy, and also in my own
dear old Deutschland—and even think it’s useful to throw bombs into innocent
crowds, and shoot pistols at their rulers, or at any one. I won’t go into that. I
might seem to be speaking for myself, and the fact is that for myself I don’t care; I
am so old that I may hope to spend the few days that are left me without receiving
a bullet. But before you go any further please think a little whether you are right.’
(243)
Madame Grandoni’s premonition may be the most poignant in the novel, for she seems to
understand, in a way the other characters cannot, that this revolution is haunted by a recent past.
“‘Do not give up anything,’” she urges Hyacinth (243). “‘What can I give up?’” he asks (243).
“‘Do not give up yourself,’” she repeats, “‘I say that to you in your interest. I think you have
some little trade—I forget what; but whatever it may be, remember that to do it well is the best
387
thing—it is better than paying visits, better even than a Princess!’” (243). Madame Grandoni’s
ambivalence about Hyacinth’s profession seems a logical extension to the rest of the novel. She
is, however, insistent that he sever his ties to the other revolutionaries because she realizes this
loyalty will cost him his life.
The end of The Princess Casamassima may be the most famous part. In James’s final
turn, Hyacinth kills himself, not the Duke, when he receives his summons from Hoffendahl, via
Schinkel, thus fulfilling Madame Grandoni’s tragic premonition. The Princess sees Hyacinth’s
dead body in Schinkel’s company, and his self-censored reflection—detachedly elegiac—is the
last line in the novel: “He picked it [the pistol] up and carefully placed it on the mantle-shelf,
keeping, equally carefully, to himself the reflection that it would certainly have served much
better for the Duke” (590–591). Traditionally, critics have read Hyacinth’s suicide as the novel’s
defining moment and as an answer to the politics-versus-aesthetics question that so absorbs
Hyacinth in Venice. Whether these critics read the suicide as James’s recapitulation of fin-desiècle liberalism or conservatism, they have argued that this death is, necessarily, Hyacinth’s
final act of heroism or anti-heroism.253
Lionel Trilling was one of the first critics to read Hyacinth’s death in terms of this
hermeneutic ultimatum; however, he also suggests that Hyacinth’s suicide may be read as a
meditation on Jamesian ambivalence. “By the time Hyacinth’s story draws to its end,” Trilling
writes, “his mind is in a perfect equilibrium, not of irresolution but of awareness” (85).
“Hyacinth’s death,” he continues, “is not his way of escaping from irresolution. It is truly a
253
For interpretations of Hyacinth’s suicide, see especially Trilling, Tanner, Christie, Seaton, Stuart, Jenkins,
Maynard, and Boudreau. Stuart’s useful reception history outlines our critical tendency to read Hyacinth’s dead
body as a symbol for certain political or apolitical sensibilities and for certain moral meanings: “Much of the critical
controversy [ . . .] has focused on determining the motive for Hyacinth Robinson’s suicide. Typically characterizing
his death as either the result of an insoluble moral dilemma or a delusional impulse, the novel’s critics have
generally failed to recognize the intended heroism of his self-destruction and have thus underestimated the
conservatism of James’s political critique” (22). Tanner shows how Hyacinth’s suicide is fated; suicide is, he
argues, inscribed in Hyacinth’s very name.
388
sacrifice, an act of heroism. He is a hero of civilization because he dares do more than
civilization does: embodying two ideals at once, he takes upon himself, in full consciousness,
the guilt of each” (86). Stuart Christie’s reading extends Trilling’s argument that this novel is a
classic bildungsroman. Yet Christie dubs The Princess Casamassima a “still-born bildung,” for
if suicide is Hyacinth’s necessary resolution within the logic of the novel, it isn’t necessarily an
answer to questions about whether he’s the hero, the anti-hero, or how he reconciles politics and
aesthetics (214). Instead, Christie reads Hyacinth’s death as a metanarrative commentary on the
bildungsroman: “Hyacinth’s suicide revolts, equally, against the plot within the novel and the
plotting of novels; his act rebels against the scarcity of narrative possibilities offered by the
Victorian life as they currently stood” (214). Indeed, Christie argues that plot of this book may
be a corrective to “mid-century syndico-anarchist movements,” since the plot is “modeled
loosely on the 1848 revolutions in Europe,” and since the plot, as James admits himself, was a
“failure” (214).254 Christie is right, for Hyacinth is self-conscious about his trajectory within
Hoffendahl’s “plot,” perhaps even more than the narrator, as we witness in his letter to the
Princess. Yet Trilling is also right about Hyacinth’s “full consciousness,” even if we choose to
read The Princess Casamassima as a bildungsroman that is predicated on the theme of
“irresolution,” not as a novel that allegorizes a young man’s dead body as heroism or as political
idealism.
I argue, with Trilling and with Christie in mind, that the letter, not the suicide, is the
pivotal moment in The Princess Casamassima, because it shows how ambivalence is Hyacinth’s
254
Hyacinth’s suicide appears at the end of the narrative, just as the graphic description of Sora Lena’s does in
Vernon Lee’s “The Legend of Madame Krasinska” (1892). Like Sora Lena’s suicide, Hyacinth’s suicide seems to
be a delayed reaction, not only to the plot (of the story or of the novel) but also to the Italian Risorgimento and the
other revolutions of 1848. These characters’ deaths have uncanny parallels, for both James and Lee suggest they are
the characters’ solutions to crises aren’t fully realized until years and even decades after the characters first
experience the realities of their respective revolutions.
389
defining quality. I argue, too, that we should be cautious when connecting the importance of the
letter to the importance of the suicide, for regardless of James’s metanarrative project, he isn’t
representing suicide as the logical, or the right, conclusion to politicoaesthetic ambivalence. Yet
if the letter is as crucial as the suicide to our understanding of Hyacinth’s world-weary
disposition, and his understanding of revolutions in France, Italy, and England, then it’s
important to consider this is also a metanarrative on the death-in-Venice convention that defined
Anglo-American letters during the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. “Death in Venice
may seem an immemorial cliché to the twentieth century,” Auchard acknowledges, “but the
decay of the city—physical, artistic, spiritual, political, and particularly social—was to the
nineteenth-century traveler a recent phenomenon” (xviii). While Auchard’s reading of the deathin-Venice convention is meant to introduce James’s nonfiction essays about the city, it may be
equally useful for our understanding of Hyacinth’s epistolary vignette. Indeed, within the logic
of the novel, it doesn’t make sense for Hyacinth to die in Venice. He has to return to London in
order to come to meaningful terms with his newfound ambivalence. Regardless of whether he
does or doesn’t intend to fulfill Hoffendahl’s “plot,” he cannot realize any kind of resolution for
himself abroad. “If Rome’s transformation was sudden and drastic for the priest, for the citizen,
and for the tourist,” Auchard continues, “Venice’s metaphor knew a far more gradual
transmutation. It was the city’s peculiar decline that was to preoccupy many imaginations,
although its physical decay was not particularly dramatic” (xvii). For if, to extend Auchard’s
point, we are to understand Hyacinth through Venice or through the Venice metaphor, then he,
too, experiences “a far more gradual transmutation” across the plot of the novel, one that is about
his inner life as much as it is about his death. The Princess Casamassima, then, extends, but
390
much more importantly revises, a sustained convention in Anglo-American letters from Italy: it
isn’t death in Venice; it is death in the wake of post-Risorgimento Venice.
391
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alaya, Flavia. “The Ring, the Rescue, & the Risorgimento: Reunifying the Brownings’ Italy.”
Browning Institute Studies 6 (1978): 1–41. Print.
Alberge, Dalya. “Emma ‘ripped off my ideas for plot of her film’: U.S. author accuses
Thompson of plagiarism.” The Daily Mail. 24 October 2011. Web. 1 November 2011.
Alexander, Edward. Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and the Modern Temper. Columbus: Ohio
State UP, 1973. Print.
Andres, Sophia. “The Unhistoric in History: George Eliot’s Challenge to Victorian
Historiography.” CLIO 26.1 (1996): 79–95. Print.
Armstrong, Isobel. “Casa Guidi Windows: Spectacle and Politics in 1851.” Unfolding the
South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy.” Eds. Alison
Chapman and Jane Stabler. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 51–69. Print.
——. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets, and Politics. New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.
Auchard, John. Introduction. Italian Hours. By Henry James. New York: Penguin, 1992. ix–
xxxix. Print.
Auerbach, Nina. “Dorothea’s Lost Dog.” Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Karen
Chase. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 87–106. Print.
Banta, Martha. “Beyond Post-Modernism: The Sense of History in The Princess
Casamassima.” The Henry James Review 3.2 (1982): 96–107. Print.
Barnes, David. “Historicizing the Stones: Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Italian
Nationalism.” Comparative Literature 62.3 (2010): 246–261. Print.
392
Barolini, Helen. “Effie in Venice and the Roman Spring of Margaret Fuller. The Virginia
Quarterly Review. 78.4 (2002): 636–651. Print.
Batchelor, John. John Ruskin: A Life. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000. Print.
Beaty, Jerome. “History by Indirection: The Era of Reform in ‘Middlemarch.’” 1.2 (1957):
173–179. Print.
Beer, Gillian. “What’s Not in Middlemarch?” Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century. Ed.
Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 15–36. Print.
Bell, Millicent. “The Marble Faun and the Waste of History.” The Southern Review 35.2
(1999): 354–370. Print.
——. “Hawthorne and the Real.” Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Millicent
Bell. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. 1–21. Print.
Bentley, Nancy. “Slaves and Fauns: Hawthorne and the Uses of Primitivism.” English Literary
History 57.4 (1990): 901–937. Print.
Berthold, Dennis. “Italy, the Civil War, and the Politics of Friendship.” Hawthorne and
Melville: Writing a Relationship. Eds. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person.
Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. 133–154. Print.
Boime, Albert. Art in an Age of Civil Struggle, 1848-1871. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.
Print.
——. The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in
Nineteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Print.
Bonaparte, Felicia. “Middlemarch: The Genesis of Myth in the English Novel: The
Relationship between Literary Form and Modern Predicament.” Notre Dame English
Journal 13.3 (1981): 107–154. Print.
393
Booth, Alison. “Little Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke: Interpreting the Heroines of History.”
Nineteenth-Century Literature 41.2 (1986): 190–216. Print.
Boudreau, Kristin. Henry James’ Narrative Technique. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Print.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard
Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Print.
Bowker, Peter and Franny Moyle, writs. Desperate Romantics. Dir. Paul Gay and Diarmuid
Lawrence. Perf. Samuel Barnett, Mark Benton, Sam Crane, Rebecca Davies, Philip
Davis, Josie Farmiloe, Poppy Lee Friar, Georgie Glen, Tom Hollander, Jennie Jacques,
Polly Kemp, Amy Manson, Maimie McCoy, Dyfrig Morris, Ian Puleston-Davies, Peter
Sandys-Clarke, Rafe Spall, Zoe Tapper, Natalie Thomas, Aidan Turner, Christian WolfLa-’Moy. The British Broadcasting Corporation, 2009. Television.
Brattin, Joel J. “Middlemarch: the Novel, the Manuscript, and Italy.” The Victorians and Italy:
Literature, Travel, Politics and Art. Eds. Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, and Paul Vita.
Monza: Polimetrica, 2009. 291–300. Print.
Brodhead, Richard. Introduction. The Marble Faun. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York:
Penguin, 1990. ix–xxix. Print.
Brooks, Robin writ. The Golden Triangle: The Awakening Conscience. Dir. Clive Brill. Perf.
Jonathan Firth, Julie Cox, Alan Cox, and Damian Lewis. The British Broadcasting
Corporation, 1998. Radio.
——. The Golden Triangle: The Order of Release. Dir. Clive Brill. Perf. Bob Peck, Sharon
Small, and David Tennant. The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1998. Radio.
——. The Golden Triangle: Love among the Ruins. Dir. Clive Brill. Perf. Ken Cranham and
Maggie Steed. The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1998. Radio.
394
Brooks, Van Wyck. The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy 1760–1915.
New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958. Print.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. Ed. Margaret Reynolds. New York: Norton, 1996.
——. Casa Guidi Windows. Ed. Julia Markus. New York: The Browning Institute, 1977.
Print.
——. Last Poems. New York: James Miller, 1862. Google Book Search. Web. 15 March
2012.
——. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Vol. 1. 3rd ed. Ed. Frederic G. Kenyon.
London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1898. Print.
Budick, Emily Miller. “Perplexity, sympathy, and the question of the human: a reading of The
Marble Faun.” The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. Richard H.
Millington. New York: Cambridge UP, 2004. 230–250. Print.
Bullen, J. B. “Ruskin, Venice, and the Construction of Femininity.” The Review of English
Studies 46.184 (1995): 502–520. Print.
Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture,”
1800–1918. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993. Print.
——. “A Continent of Pictures: Reflections on the ‘Europe’ of Nineteenth-Century Tourists.”
PMLA 108.1 (1993): 30–44. Print.
Byer, Robert H. “Words, Monuments, Beholders: The Visual Arts in Hawthorne’s The Marble
Faun. American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature.
Ed. David C. Miller. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. 163–185. Print.
Byron, Lord George Gordon. The Major Works. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2000. Print.
395
Cameron, Sharon. Impersonality: Seven Essays. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007. Print.
Camus, Marianne. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Italy.” The Victorians in Italy: Literature,
Travel, Politics and Art. Eds. Alessandro Vescovi, Luisa Villa, and Paul Vita. Monza:
Polimetrica, 2009. 225–235. Print.
“Caricature.” Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 15 March 2012.
Carignan, Michael I. “Fiction as History Or History as Fiction? George Eliot, Hayden White,
and Nineteenth-Century Historicism.” CLIO 29.4 (2000): 395–415. Print.
Case, Alison. “Gender and Narration in Aurora Leigh.” Victorian Poetry 29.1 (1991): 17–32.
Print.
Chapman, Alison. “‘In our own blood drenched the pen’: Italy and sensibility in Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Last Poems (1962).” Women’s Writing 10.2 (2003): 269–286. Print.
——. “Risorgimenti: Spiritualism, Politics and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” Unfolding the
South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy.” Eds. Alison
Chapman and Jane Stabler. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. 70–89. Print.
——. “‘Vulgar needs’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Profit, and Literary Value.” Victorian
Literature and Finance. Ed. Francis O’Gorman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 73–90.
Print.
Chapman, Robin and Ray Lawler, writs. The Love School. Dir. Piers Haggard, John Glenister,
and Robert Knights. Perf. David Burke, Kenneth Colley, David Collings, Peter Egan,
Anne Kidd, Ben Kingsley, Bernard Lloyd, Kika Markham, and Patricia Quinn. The
British Broadcasting Corporation, 1975. Television.
Chase, Karen. Introduction. Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Karen Chase.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 3–14. Print.
396
Christie, Stuart. “Sociability of Terror in The Princess Casamassima.” Tracing Henry James.
Eds. Melanie H. Ross and Greg W. Zacharias. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2008. 213–236. Print.
Clegg, Jeanne. “Superficial Pastimes, Fine Emotions and Metaphysical Intentions: James and
Ruskin in Venice.” Henry James e Venezia. Ed. Sergio Perosa. Florence: Leo S.
Olschki, 1985. 159–170. Print.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Into the Canon: Middlemarch.” The Atlantic. 16 December 2011. Web.
22 December 2011.
Colby, Vineta. Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2003.
Print.
Cooper, Suzanne Fagence. Effie: The Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, John Ruskin and John
Everett Millais. New York: St. Martin’s, 2010. Print.
Cordery, Lindsey. “Beautiful Freedom: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows.”
The Victorians and Italy: Literature, Travel, Politics, and Art. Eds. Alessandro Vescovi,
Luisa Villa, and Paul Vita. Monza: Polimetrica, 2009. 83–97. Print.
Cosslett, Tess. “Revisiting Fictional Italy, 1887–1908: Vernon Lee, Mary Ward, and E. M.
Forster.” English Literature in Transition 1880–1920 52.3 (2009): 312–328. Print.
Crapanzano, Aleksandra, writ. Untouched. Dir. Andrucha Waddington. Perf. Keira Knightley.
Ealing Metro International, forthcoming 2013. Film.
Cronin, Richard. “Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Italy and the Poetry of
Citizenship.” Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and
Artists in Italy.” Eds. Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler. Manchester: Manchester UP,
2003. 35–50. Print.
397
Cutting, Andrew. Death in Henry James. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Print.
Daly, Gay. Pre-Raphaelites in Love. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989. Print.
Davis, Clark. Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Print.
De Biasio, Anna. “‘The Catalogues Are Finished’: Travelling in Venice According to James.”
Tracing Henry James. Ed. Melanie H. Ross and Greg W. Zacharias. Newcastly upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 304–315. Print.
Deegan, Thomas. “George Eliot’s Novels of the Historical Imagination.” CLIO 1.3 (1972): 21–
33. Print.
De Pascale, Enrico. Death and Resurrection in Art. Trans. Anthony Shugaar. Los Angeles: J.
Paul Getty Museum. 2007. Print.
DeVine, Christine. “Revolution and Democracy in the London Times and The Princess
Casamassima.” The Henry James Review 23.1 (2002): 53–71. Print.
Dickens, Charles. Pictures from Italy. New York: William H. Colyer, 1846. Google Book
Search. Web. 1 June 2009.
Dillon, Steve and Katherine Frank. “Defenestrations of the Eye: Flow, Fire, and Sacrifice in
Casa Guidi Windows.” Victorian Poetry 35.4 (1997): 471–492. Print.
Donoghue, Emma. “Come, Gentle Night.” The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. Orlando:
Harcourt, 2002. 99–114. Print.
Downing, Crystal. “The Visual and the Verbal in Middlemarch.” PMLA 112.3 (1997): 434–
435. Print.
Dramin, Edward. “‘A New Unfolding of Life’: Romanticism in the Late Novels of George
Eliot.” Victorian Literature and Culture. 26.2 (1998): 273–302. Print.
398
Dunne, Michael. Hawthorne’s Narrative Strategies. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. Print.
Elgin, John. Venice Transfigured: The Myth of Venice in British Culture, 1660–1797.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Print.
Eliot, George. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale UP,
1955. Print.
——. The Journals of George Eliot. Eds. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.
——. Middlemarch. 1871–1872. Ed. David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
Emerick, Ronald. “The Love Rectangle in Roderick Hudson: Another Look at Christina Light.”
Studies in the Novel 18.4 (1986): 353–366. Print.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed.
Mary Oliver. New York: Modern Library, 2000. 307–326. Print.
Enk, Bryan. “Keira Knightley Gets Artsy with ‘Untouched.’” NextMovie. 7 November 2011.
Web. 12 November 2011.
Estrin, Mark W. “Narrative Ambivalence in Hawthorne’s ‘Feathertop.’” The Journal of
Narrative Technique 5.3 (1975): 164–173. Print.
Falcoff, Mark. “Revolution for the Rich: James’s Princess Casamassima.” New Criterion 24.7
(2006): 21–26. Print.
Flint, Kate. “The Materiality of Middlemarch.” Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century. Ed.
Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 65–86. Print.
Fluhr, Nicole. “Empathy and Identity in Vernon Lee’s Hauntings.” Victorian Studies 48.2
(2006): 287–294. Print.
399
Follini, Tamara, L. “James, Ruskin, and The Stones of Venice.” Tracing Henry James. Ed.
Melanie H. Ross and Greg W. Zacharias. Newcastly upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars,
2008. 355–373. Print.
Fraser, A. D. “The Restoration of the Ludovisi Gaul.” American Journal of Archaeology. 36.4
(1932): 418–425. Print.
Fraser, Hilary. “St. Theresa, St. Dorothea, and Miss Brooke in Middlemarch.” NineteenthCentury Fiction 40.4 (1986): 400–411. Print.
French, A. L. “A Note on Middlemarch.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 26.3 (1971): 339–347.
Print.
Fuller, Margaret. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Eds. William Henry Channing, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and James Freeman Clarke. 2 vols. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and
Company, 1852. Print.
——. “These Sad But Glorious Days”: Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850. Eds. Larry J.
Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith. New Haven, Yale UP, 1991. Print.
Furst, Lilian. “Class Ideology in Middlemarch.” PMLA 116.2 (2001): 429–430. Print.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966. Print.
Gautier, Théophile. Journeys in Italy. Trans. Daniel B. Vermilye. New York: Brentano’s,
1902. Google Book Search. Web. 10 August 2011.
Gemme, Paola. Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum
American Identity. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2005. Print.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento.”
PMLA 99.2 (1984): 194–211. Print.
400
Gilmore, Michael T. “Hawthorne and Politics (Again): Words and Deeds in the 1850s.”
Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Millicent Bell. Columbus: Ohio
State UP, 2005. 22–39. Print.
Gilmour, David. The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions, and their Peoples. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Print.
Goldman, Arnold. “The Plot of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.” Journal of American Studies
18.3 (1984): 383–404. Print.
Gollin, Rita K. and John L. Idol, Jr. Prophetic Pictures: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Knowledge and
Uses of the Visual Arts. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. Print.
Grenander, M. E. “Henry James's Capricciosa: Christina Light in Roderick Hudson and The
Princess Casamassima.” PMLA 75.3 (1960): 309–319. Print.
Groth, Helen. “A Different Look: Visual Technologies and the Making of History in Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows.” Textual Practice 14.1 (2000): 31–52. Print.
Guerra, Gustavo. “Trilling's James: Liberalism and Selfhood in ‘The Princess Casamassima.’”
Papers on Language and Literature 34.4 (1998): 388–419. Print.
Guiton, Shirley. No Magic Eden. London: Hamilton, 1972. Print.
Hardack, Richard. “‘In Old Rome’s Pantheon’: Hawthorne, Melville, and the Two Republics.”
Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship. Eds. Jana L. Argersinger and Leland
S. Person. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2008. 269–296. Print.
Hardy, Barbara. “Rome in Middlemarch.” George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies 24–25.2
(1993): 1–16. Print.
401
Harris, Leigh Coral. “From Mythos to Logos: Political Aesthetics and Liminal Poetics in
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Casa Guidi Windows.” Victorian Literature and Culture
28.1 (2000): 109–131. Print.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The
American Notebooks. vol. 8. Ed. Thomas Woodson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962.
Print.
——. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The French and Italian
Notebooks. vol. 14. Ed. Thomas Woodson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1962. Print.
——. The House of Seven Gables. 1851. Ed. Robert S. Levine. New York: Norton, 2006.
Print.
——. The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni. 1860. Ed. Richard Brodhead. New
York: Penguin, 1990. Print.
Hayter, Alethea. Mrs. Browning: A Poet’s Work and its Setting. New York: Barnes & Noble,
1963. Print.
Hemans, Felicia. Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Print.
Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. “The Uses of Italy in Roderick Hudson and The Princess
Casamassima.” The Sweetest Impression of Life: The James Family and Italy. Eds.
James W. Tuttleton and Agostino Lombardo. New York: New York UP, 1990. 66–88.
Print.
Hibbert, Christopher. Venice: The Biography of a City. London: Grafton, 1988. Print.
Hilton, Tim. John Ruskin. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Print.
402
Hollywood, Paul. “The Artist as Anarchist: Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima and the
Prospect of Revolution.” Conrad, James, and Other Relations. Eds. Keith Carbine and
Owen Knowles. Lublin: Maria Curie-Skłodowska UP, 1998. 277–311. Print.
Holloway, Julia Bolton. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Risorgimento: Aurora Leigh and Other
Poems.” Florin Website. 1 April 2010. <http://www.florin.ms/ebb.hmtl>.
Hornback, Bert G. Middlemarch: A Novel of Reform. Boston: Twayne, 1988. Print.
Howe, Irving. Politics and the Novel. New York: Horizon, 1957. Print.
Howze, Louie Jo Taylor. Patriotic Ambivalence: A Study of Hawthorne’s Abortive English
Romances. Diss. U Michigan, 1980. Print.
Hughes, Robert. Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.
Print.
Hunt, Tristram. Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City. New York:
Metropolitan, 2005. Print.
James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” Tales of Henry James. Ed. Christof Wegelin and Henry B.
Wonham. New York: Norton, 2003. 375–394. Print.
——. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New
York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.
——. Italian Hours. 1909. Ed. John Auchard. New York: Penguin, 1992. Print.
——. “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life.” Henry James: Literary Criticism. Vol. 1.
Ed. Leon Edel. New York: Library of America, 1984. 958–966. Print.
——. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Ed. Geofrey Moore. London: Penguin, 1984. Print.
——. The Princess Casamassima. 1886. Ed. Derek Brewer. London: Penguin, 1987. Print.
——. Roderick Hudson. 1875. Ed. Geoffrey Moore. London: Penguin, 1986. Print.
403
——. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1903. Google Books.
20 February 2012. <http://books.google.com>.
——. The Wings of the Dove. 1902. Ed. J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks. New York:
Norton, 2003. Print.
James, Admiral Sir William. John Ruskin and Effie Gray. New York: Scribner’s, 1947. Print.
Jameson, Anna. Diary of an Ennuyée. London: Henry Colburn, 1826. Google Book Search.
Web. 1 September 2009.
Jenkins, Joyce L. “Art against Equality.” Philosophy and Literature 22.1 (1998): 108–118.
Print.
Johnson, Barbara. Persons and Things. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008. Print.
Johnson, Chloe. “Presenting the Pre-Raphelites: From Radio Reminiscences to Desperate
Romantics.” Visual Culture in Britain 11.1 (2010): 67–92. Print.
Johnson, Warren. “Hyacinth Robinson or The Princess Casamassima?” Texas Studies in
Language and Literature 28.3 (1986): 296–323. Print.
Joseph, Gerhard. “Hegel, Derrida, George Eliot, and the Novel.” Literature Interpretation
Theory 1.1–2 (1989): 59–68. Print.
Keirstead, Christopher. “A ‘Bad Patriot’?: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Cosmopolitanism.”
Victorians Institute Journal 33 (2005): 69–95. Print.
Kemp, Mark A. R. “The Marble Faun and American Postcolonial Ambivalence.” Modern
Fiction Studies 43.1 (1997): 209–236. Print.
Kimmey, John L. “The Princess Casamassima and the Quality of Bewilderment.” NineteenthCentury Fiction 22.1 (1967): 47–62. Print.
404
Kolich, Augustus M. “Miriam and the Conversion of the Jews in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The
Marble Faun.” Studies in the Novel 33.4 (2001): 430–443. Print.
Kolk, Heidi. “Tropes of Suffering and Postures of Authority in Margaret Fuller’s European
Travel Letters.” Biography 28.3 (2005): 377–413. Print.
Lal, Malashri. “Hyacinth Robinson’s Existential Choice.” Existentialism in American
Literature. Ed. Ruby Chatterji. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1983. 110–120. Print.
Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. London:
Chatto & Windus, 1950. Print.
Lee, Vernon. “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art.” Hauntings and Other
Fantastic Tales. Eds. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham. Mississauga: Broadview,
2006. 291–320. Print.
——. Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales. 1890. Eds. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia
Pulham. Mississauga: Broadview, 2006. Print.
——. Miss Brown: A Novel. London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1884. Google Book
Search. Web. 1 June 2009.
——. The Sentimental Traveller: Notes on Places. London: The Bodley Head, 1908. Google
Book Search. Web. 1 June 2009.
——. Vanitas: Polite Stories. 1892. Doylestown: Wildside, 2004. Print.
Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986. Print.
——. “Ghosts, Aestheticism, and ‘Vernon Lee.’” Victorian Literature and Culture 28.1 (2000):
1–14. Print.
Lennon, John and Malcolm Foley. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster.
London: Continuum, 2000. Print.
405
Leverenz, David. “Working Women and Creative Doubles: Getting to The Marble Faun.”
Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Millicent Bell. Columbus: Ohio
State UP, 2005. 144–158. Print.
Levine, Robert S. “‘Antebellum Rome’ in The Marble Faun.” American Literary History 2.1
(1990): 19–38. Print.
Lewis, Jean Hoffmann. “Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aesthetic
Struggle.” Victorians Institute Journal 25 (1997): 159–176. Print.
Licht, Merete. “Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady: Vernon Lee in The Princess Casamassima.”
A Literary Miscellany Presented to Eric Jacobsen. Eds. Graham D. Caie and Holger
Nørgaard. Copenhagen: U of Copenhagen P, 1988. 285–303. Print.
Lloyd, Jennifer M. “Conflicting Expectations in Nineteenth-Century British Matrimony: The
Failed Companionate Marriage of Effie Gray and John Ruskin.” Journal of Women’s
History 11.2 (1999): 86–109. Print.
Lombardo, Agostino. “Italy and the Artist in Henry James.” The Sweetest Impression of Life:
The James Family and Italy. Eds. James W. Tuttleton and Agostino Lombardo. New
York: New York UP, 1990. 228–239. Print.
Long, Robert Emmet. “James’s Roderick Hudson: The end of the Apprenticeship—Hawthorne
and Turgenev.” American Literature 48.3 (1976): 312–326. Print.
Lootens, Tricia. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization.
Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996. Print.
Lutyens, Mary. Preface. Effie in Venice: Mrs. John Ruskin’s Letters Home, 1849–1852. By
Euphemia Ruskin. Ed. Mary Lutyens. London: Pallas, 1999. Print.
——. Millais and the Ruskins. London: John Murray, 1967. Print.
406
——. The Ruskins and the Grays. London: John Murray, 1972. Print.
Maertz, Gregory. Note. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. By George Eliot.
Peterborough: Broadview, 2004. Print.
Mahoney, Kristin. “Haunted Collections: Vernon Lee and Ethical Consumption.” Criticism
48.1 (2006): 39–67. Print.
Manning, Susan. Introduction. The Marble Faun. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2002. ix – xxxix. Print.
Markels, Julian. “Socialism-Anxiety: The Princess Casamassima and Its New York Critics.”
College Literature 27.2 (2000): 37–56. Print.
Markus, Julia. Introduction. Casa Guidi Windows. Ed. Julia Markus. New York: The
Browning Institute, 1977. xv–xl. Print.
——. “‘Old Pictures in Florence’: Through Casa Guidi Windows.” Browning Institute Studies
in Victorian Literary and Cultural History 6 (1978): 43–61. Print.
Marovitz, Sanford E. “Roderick Hudson: James’s Marble Faun.” Texas Studies in Literature
and Language 11.4 (1970): 1427–1443. Print.
Marsh, Jan. The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood. New York: St. Martin’s, 1985. Print.
Martin, Robert K. and Leland S. Person, eds. Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in
Nineteenth-Century Italy. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2002. Print.
Martin, W.R. “‘The Eye of Mr. Ruskin’: James’s View on Venetian Artists.” The Henry James
Review 5.2 (1984): 107–116. Print.
Marvin, Miranda. “The Ludovisi Barbarians: The Grand Manner.” Memoirs of the American
Academy of Rome: Supplementary Volumes. vol. 1. U of Michigan P, 2002. 205–223.
Print.
407
Mason, Michael York. “Middlemarch and History.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25.4 (1971):
417–431. Print.
Matheson, Neill. “Heavy Spirits: Depression and Materiality in The Marble Faun.” The
Journal of Narrative Technique 24.3 (1994): 237–255. Print.
Matteson, John. The Lives of Margaret Fuller. New York: Norton, 2012. Print.
Maxwell, Catherine and Patricia Pulham. Introduction. Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales.
Eds. Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham. Mississauga: Broadview, 2006. 9–27.
Print.
Maxwell, Catherine and Patricia Pulham, eds. Vernon Lee: Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics.
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. Print.
Mayer, David R. “Artemisia Gentileschi as Artist Model for Miriam in Hawthorne’s The Marble
Faun.” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 31.2 (2005): 19–33. Print.
McCormack, Kathleen. “Middlemarch: Dorothea’s Husbands at the Vatican Museums.”
Victorians Institute Journal 20 (1992): 75–91. Print.
McDonald, Eva. John Ruskin’s Wife. London: Robert Hale, 1979. Print.
McFarland, Philip. Hawthorne in Concord. New York: Grove, 2004. Print.
McMahan, Anna Benneson. Florence in the Poetry of the Brownings. Chicago: A. C. McClurg,
1904. Print.
McMaster, Juliet. “Will Ladislaw and other Italians with White Mice.” Victorian Review 16.2
(1990): 1–7. Print.
Meissner, Collin. “The Princess Casamassima: ‘A Dirty Intellectual Fog.’” The Henry James
Review 19.1 (1998): 53–71. Print.
408
Melchiori, Barbara Arnett. “Hyacinth’s Letter from Venice.” Henry James e Venezia. Ed.
Sergio Perosa. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1985. 127–133. Print.
Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. Amherst: Prometheus, 2001. Print.
Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1989. Print.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Painting and the Novel. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1975. Print.
Michie, Helena. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2009. Print.
Milder, Robert. “Beautiful Illusions: Hawthorne and the Site of Moral Law.” Nathaniel
Hawthorne Review 33.2 (2007): 1–23. Print.
Miley, John. The History of the Papal States from their Origin to the Present Day. London: T.
C. Newby, 1850. Google Book Search. 3 March 2012.
Miller, J. Hillis. “A Conclusion in Which Almost Nothing is Concluded: Middlemarch’s
‘Finale.’” Middlemarch in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2006. 133–156. Print.
——. “Narrative and History.” ELH 41.3 (1974): 455–473. Print.
Modern Painters. The Santa Fe Opera. Web. 1 November 2011.
Moine, Fabienne. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Italian Poetry: Constructing National Identity
and Shaping the Poetic Self.” Performing National Identity: Anglo-Italian Cultural
Transactions. Eds. Manfred Pfister and Ralf Hertel. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 123–
136. Print.
Montefiore, Simon Sebag. “Every Revolution Is Revolutionary in Its Own Way.” The New York
Times. 26 March 2011. Web. 25 March 2012.
409
Morrissey, Kim. Mrs Ruskin. Web. 1 November 2011.
Moyle, Franny. Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites. London:
Murray, 2009. Print.
Mullin, Eugene, writ. The Love of John Ruskin. Dir. Van Dyke Brooke. Perf. Leo Delaney,
Helen Gardner, Julia Swayne Gordon, Harry Morey, and Earle Williams. Vitagraph
Company of America, 1912. Film.
Murphy, Gregory. The Countess. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2002. Print.
——. “The Day I Sat in Emma Thompson’s Kitchen and Accused Her of Stealing My Movie.”
The Daily Mail. 24 April 2011. Web. 30 August 2011.
Nangle, Benjamin. Introduction. Ruskin’s Letters from Venice 1851–1852. Ed. John Lewis
Bradley. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. i–xxi. Print.
Nattermann, Udo. “Dread and Desire: ‘Europe’ in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.” Essays in
Literature 21.1 (1994): 54–67. Print.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.
Norwich, John Julius. Paradise of Cities: Venice in the Nineteenth Century. New York:
Doubleday, 2003. Print.
Nussbaum, Martha C. “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral
Imagination.” Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York:
Oxford UP, 1990. 148–167. Print.
——. “Perception and Revolution: The Princess Casamassima and the Political Imagination.”
Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.
195–219. Print.
410
O’Connor, Maura. The Romance of Italy and the English Political Imagination. New York: St.
Martin’s, 1998. Print.
Oltean, Roxana. “An ‘Unnatural Alliance’: Realism and Revolution in Henry James's The
Princess Casamassima.” The Henry James Review 30.2 (2009): 144–161. Print.
Onderdonk, Todd. “The Marble Mother: Hawthorne’s Iconographies of the Feminine.” Studies
in American Fiction 31.1 (2003): 73–100. Print.
The Passion of John Ruskin. Dir. Alex Chapple. Perf. Neve Campbell, Mark McKinney, and
Colette Stevenson. John Gundy, Allan Magee, and Melanie McCaig, 1994. Short Film.
Paoletti, John and Gary Radke. Art in Renaissance Italy. Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2002.
Print.
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1998. Print.
Paulits, Walter J. “Ambivalence in ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” American Literature 41.4
(1970): 577–584. Print.
Phelps, Deborah. “‘At the Roadside of Humanity’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning Abroad.”
Creditable Warriors: English Literature and the Wider World, 1830–1876. Ed. Michael
Cotsell. London: Ashfield, 1990: 225–242. Print.
Plant, Margaret. Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Print.
Pomerance, Eve. The Secret Trials of Effie Gray. 1997.
Puckett, Kent. “Make No Mistake: Getting It Right in The Princess Casamassima.” Novel 43.1
(2010): 60–64. Print.
Pulham, Patricia. Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee’s Supernatural Tales.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Print.
411
Purser, John, writ. Parrots and Owls. Dir. Jeremy Hull. Perf. Michael Pennington, Sean
McGinley, and Dermot Crowley. The British Broadcasting Corporation, 1994. Radio.
Putnam, Hilary. “Taking Rules Seriously: A Response to Martha Nussbaum.” New Literary
History 15.1 (1983): 193–200. Print.
Redford, Bruce. Venice and the Grand Tour. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Print.
Reynolds, Larry and Susan Belasco Smith. Introduction. “These Sad But Glorious Days”:
Dispatches from Europe, 1846–1850. Eds. Larry Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1991. 1–35. Print.
Riall, Lucy. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.
——. Risorgimento: The History of Italy from Napoleon to Nation State. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Richards, B. “Another Model for Christina Light.” The Henry James Review 5.1 (1983): 60–
65. Print.
Rischin, Abigail S. “Beside the Reclining Statue: Ekphrasis, Narrative, and Desire in
Middlemarch.” PMLA 111.5 (1996): 1121–1132. Print.
Riss, Arthur. “The Art of Discrimination.” English Literary History 71.1 (2004): 251–287.
Print.
——. “Nathaniel Hawthorne and Transnationality.” Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial
Essays. Ed. Millicent Bell. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. 88–106. Print.
Rose, Phyllis. Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. New York: Penguin, 1988. Print.
Rosenberg, John D. The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Ruskin’s Genius. New York:
Columbia UP, 1986. Print.
412
Rosenblum, Dolores. “Casa Guidi Windows and Aurora Leigh: The Genesis of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's Visionary Aesthetic.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 4.1
(1985): 61–68. Print.
Rowe, John Carlos. “Nathaniel Hawthorne and Transnationality.” Hawthorne and the Real:
Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Millicent Bell. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2005. 88–106.
Print.
——. The Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984. Print.
Ruskin, Euphemia. Effie in Venice: Mrs. John Ruskin’s Letters Home, 1849–1852. Ed. Mary
Lutyens. London: Pallas, 1999. Print.
Ruskin, John. The Diaries of John Ruskin. 3 Vols. Ed. Joan Evans and John Howard
Whitehouse. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1956. Print.
——. Praeterita. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print.
——. Ruskin’s Letters from Venice 1851–1852. Ed. John Lewis Bradley. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1955. Print.
——. The Stones of Venice. Cambridge: Perseus, 2003. Print.
——. The Stones of Venice: Introductory Chapters and Local Indices (Printed Separately) for
the Use of Travellers While Staying in Venice and Verona. 1879. 4th ed. Sunnyside:
George Allen, 1886. Google Book Search. Web. 10 October 2011.
Saint-Amour, Paul. “Transatlantic Tropology in James’s Roderick Hudson.” The Henry James
Review 18.1 (1997): 22–42. Print.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp.
London: Trübner, 1883. Print.
413
Schor, Esther. “The Poetics of Politics: Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows.” Tulsa
Studies in Women's Literature 17.2 (1998): 305–324. Print.
Seaton, James. “Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima: Revolution and the Preservation of
Culture.” The Moral of the Story: Literature and Public Ethics. Ed. Henry T.
Edmondson. Lanham: Lexington, 2000. 15–25. Print.
Seltzer, Mark. “The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of Surveillance.”
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35.4 (1981): 506–534. Print.
Shaffer, Elinor. “Kubla Khan” and the Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical
Criticism and Secular Literature, 1770–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975. Print.
Siegel, Jonah. Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2005. Print.
Spear, Jeffrey L. “Ruskin’s Italy.” Browning Institute Studies 12 (1984): 73–92. Print.
Staël, Germaine de. Corinne, or Italy. Trans. Sylvia Raphael. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.
Print.
Staten, Henry. “Is Middlemarch Ahistorical?” PMLA 115.5 (2000): 991–1005. Print.
Steinmetz, Virginia V. “Images of ‘Mother-Want’ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora
Leigh.” Victorian Poetry 21.4 (1983): 351–367.
Stern, Milton R. Contexts for Hawthorne: The Marble Faun and the Politics of Openness and
Closure in American Literature. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991. Print.
Stivers, David. “Witnessing the Invisible: Narrative Mediation in The Princess Casamassima.”
The Henry James Review 28.2 (2007): 159–173. Print.
Stoehr, Taylor. “Words and Deeds in The Princess Casamassima.” ELH 37.1 (1970): 95–135.
Print.
414
Stone, Marjorie. “Constructing the Archive and the Nation in ‘Italy! world’s Italy!’, ‘My Last
Duchess,’ Aurora Leigh, and an Unpublished Manuscript by Elizabeth Barrett
Browning.” Victorian Review 33.1 (2007): 35–57.
Stuart, Christopher. “‘Bloom[ing] on a Dog's Allowance’: Hyancinth Robinson and the
Redemption of the Working Class in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima.”
American Literary Realism 36.1 (2003): 22–39. Print.
Tanner, Tony. Venice Desired. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.
Teahan, Sheila. “Hawthorne, James, and the Fall of Allegory in Roderick Hudson.” The Henry
James Review 12.2 (1991): 158–162. Print.
Tellefsen, Blythe Ann. “‘The Case with My Dear Native Land’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Vision
of America in The Marble Faun.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 54.4 (2000): 455–479.
Print.
Thompson, Andrew. George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from
Dante to the Risorgimento. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998. Print.
Thompson, Emma, writ. Effie. Dir. Richard Laxton. Perf. Linda Bassett, Claudia Cardinale,
Robbie Coltrane, Dakota Fanning, James Fox, Joanna Hole, Derek Jacobi, Tom
Sturridge, David Suchet, Emma Thompson, Russell Tovey, Julie Walters, and Greg
Wise. Sovereign Films, forthcoming 2012. Film.
Tolliver, Willie. Henry James as a Biographer: A Self Among Others. New York: Garland,
2000. Print.
Traisnel, Antoine. “The Temptation of Kitsch: The Fall of Hawthorne.” Nathaniel Hawthorne
Review 34.1-2 (2008): 63–80. Print.
415
Trevelyan, Raleigh. “Effie Ruskin and Pauline Trevelyan: Letters to Ruskin’s MonitressFriend.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 62 (1979): 232–
258. Print.
Treves, Guiliana Artom. The Golden Ring: The Anglo-Florentines, 1847–1862. Trans. Sylvia
Sprigge. London: Longmans, Greene, and Company, 1956. Print.
Trilling, Lionel. “The Princess Casamassima.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature
and Society. New York: Viking, 1950. 58–92. Print.
Trotter, David. “Space, Movement, and Sexual Feeling in Middlemarch.” Middlemarch in the
Twenty-first Century. Ed. Karen Chase. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 37–64. Print.
Uglow, Jenny. George Eliot. London: Virago, 2008. Print.
Valtat-Comet, Nelly. “Tracing the Venetian Masters in Henry James.” Tracing Henry James.
Ed. Melanie H. Ross and Greg W. Zacharias. Newcastly upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars, 2008. 185–201. Print.
Vendler, Helen. “Melville and the Lyric of History.” Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War.
Amherst: Prometheus, 2001. 249–268. Print.
Vicinus, Martha. “‘A Legion of Ghosts’: Vernon Lee (1856–1935) and the Art of Nostalgia.”
GLQ 10.4 (2004): 599–616. Print.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Print.
Wegener, Frederick. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Italian Independence, and the ‘Critical
Reaction’ of Henry James.” Studies in English Literature 37.4 (1997): 741–761. Print.
Weisbrode, Kenneth. On Ambivalence: The Problems and Pleasures of Having It Both Ways.
Cambridge: MIT P, 2012. Print.
416
Weisenfarth, Joseph. “Middlemarch: The Language of Art.” PMLA 97.3 (1982): 363–377.
Print.
Wilhelm, Cherry. “Conservative Reform in Middlemarch.” Theoria 53 (1979): 47–57. Print.
Williams, Merryn. Effie: A Victorian Scandal, from Ruskin’s Wife to Millais’s Muse. Sussex:
Book Guild, 2010. Print.
Williams, Susan S. Confounding Images: Photography and Portraiture in Antebellum
American Fiction. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997. Print.
Wineapple, Brenda. Hawthorne: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2003. Print.
Witemeyer, Hugh. “George Eliot, Naumann, and the Nazarenes.” Victorian Studies 18.2
(1974): 145–158. Print.
Yoder, Edwin M. “The Princess Casamassima Revisited.” The Virginia Quarterly Review 66.3
(1990): 479–487. Print.