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Between It-Narratives and Agalmata: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, (In)Animate Things and the Lifelikeness of Artefacts

Bruno Monfort
p. 193-211

Résumés

“Drowne’s Wooden Image” (1844) et “Feathertop” (1852) sont deux textes contes de Hawthorne souvent rapprochés du mythe de Pygmalion sans tenir compte des déviances qu’ils font subir au modèle d’Ovide. Célébrant la réussite miraculeuse de l’Artiste qui parvient à donner vie à la matière inerte, singulièrement dans le domaine de la sculpture, le mythe est repris par Hawthorne pour montrer que, dans le domaine de la fiction narrative, rien n’est plus banal que de susciter des effigies anthropomorphes afin de leur prêter vie. Pour faire office de personnage, comme dans “Feathertop”, il suffit de faire animer par une sorcière un ramassis de vieux oripeaux et de le lancer à la conquête des bonnes grâces d’un notable de la ville. Son échec sert de révélateur ironique à la puissance d’engendrement de la fiction. “Drowne’s Wooden Image” met en scène la capacité d’un récit de redoubler une fable devenue rumeur publique : une femme en chair et en os serait l’incarnation vivante d’une figure de proue sculptée par Drowne. Le récit n’avère nullement la légende, mais ne lui dénie pas la capacité à faire vivre l’œuvre, merveille de fiction dont, devenant « conte deux fois conté », il serait le prolongement.

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1This contribution focuses on a limited number of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales in which is plainly evinced a particular interest for age-old problematics regarding the nature of images, or of certain types of images that offer a potential for lifelikeness. It elaborates on the ways in which certain objects—“lifelike” human statues or figures—fulfill significant (meta-)narrative functions and serve to reflect on the status and nature of fiction (and art), and of their “lifelikeness” in particular. What is meant by this term is not “mimesis” conceived as an attempt at “realism” or unmediated imitation of pre-existent life in and by just a text. The Hawthorne texts dealt with here tell about imitation of art by art in circumstances when “life-like” features emerge from patterns of perception or understanding that make “the real” derive from imitation of life by artefacts. Images referred to in such texts—mostly statues, but not always—happen to be mostly manmade, three-dimensional, and designed or fashioned into existence. They are thus likely to capture human interest because of features conspicuously exhibited in them, indexing their capacity to display a creditable degree of kinship, resemblance, or similarity (credited to be) suitable to call forth the outward form of a human being in the educated mind and eye of a spectator or observer. A further degree of complexity is involved which calls for attention paid to the three-dimensional materiality of the objects involved.

  • 1 Bibliography on the Pygmalion phenomenon is vast. An idea of how extensive it is can be gained from (...)

2Not that many Hawthorne tales come to mind as paradigmatic, clear-cut examples to be examined along such lines. “Drowne’s Wooden Image” (1844) and “Feathertop” (1852) are legitimate enough specimens, items typical of a group or class not unfrequently set apart among Hawthorne’s tales by a number of critics. Having noticed that a figure consisting of hard or dead material came alive nevertheless, transcending the physical limitations imposed upon it by the natural thickness, density, and the general inertness of the stuff it is made of, they declared such episodes to be reenactments of the mythological story of Pygmalion.1 They may readily be granted the point, simply adding that, most probably, such tales are quite patently designed to be reminiscent of that classic piece. Yet, difficulties begin at this point: the object that does come alive is generally not a true artefact, and further similarities with the Pygmalion story are inconspicuously deconstructed, with a significant number of details in the tale inflected to suggest a degree of independence from the mythological pattern underlying the standard Ovidian narrative (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, ll. 238-297).

Pygmalion Revisited?: “Feathertop”

  • 2 If the critical literature on eighteenth-century hair-fashion is something to go by, the so-called (...)

3As often as not, Hawthorne’s predilection for a Pygmalion-like situation may accommodate a figure that need not be as artistically dignified as a statue, and the main protagonist need not operate strictly within the field of art. Given the right circumstances, the merest sort of materiality may be caused to come virtually alive, and for this purpose any assemblage of odds and ends without the weight and density of clay, wood or stone, ivory or marble, may do the job. The bare outline of “Feathertop” can already be recognized here. In this Hawthorne tale, the belated, half-comic figure of an old American witch has managed to outlive the dark age of persecution right into the last years before the American revolution; she apprises herself that the season is getting on when massive flocks of greedy birds will inevitably be picking at the ears of her prospective crop of grain in the surrounding fields. She thus naturally shows concern—scaring birds becomes a necessity, and she promptly decides to fix a rather derelict scarecrow standing in a nearby plot. As she makes the required moves to that effect, the inveterate reflexes of her trade get the better of her farming acumen, and a fit of frolicsomeness catches up with the practical-minded old hag: she persuades herself that she may, just for the fun of it, use her magic powers to turn her scarecrow into the finest gentleman that ever set foot in the neighboring town. She has available all kinds of bits and pieces that come in handy for the purpose, and preparations for the emergence of her creature involve quite a lot of off-the-cuff construction work, using miscellaneous remnants and leftovers such as the handle of a gardening implement for his backbone,various pieces of threadbare old clothing for his gorgeous attire, a pumpkin for his head, and the disused wig of Mother Rigby’s late husband, of the feathertop2 style, by way of his hair (269).

  • 3 This sketchy outline can be found under “January 4, 1839” in The American Notebooks (185). Ten year (...)

4The best-acknowledged source of the story has been traced to a bizarre (not to say zany) little sketch in Hawthorne’s Notebooks for 18393 where he imagines a scarecrow whose aspect changes depending on who watches it. The scarecrow is the only element of this early outline that remains in the final version of 1852. But by all standards, “Feathertop” remains a whimsical tale larded with wry observations. A parody of the act of artistic creation, it consists in a quasi-burlesque transposition, practically a send-up of the Pygmalion story that ends up revealing the shallow values of those who occupy the top rungs of society. Obviously, as we read the story in this way, we have to make allowance for the transfer from a higher key of dramatic seriousness involving “real people” to a lower key of dummy performance, with the eccentric old witch a ludicrous mimic caught up in an ersatz version of the harrowing pangs, trials, and tribulations of the process of artistic creation. Not surprisingly given the context, none of her concerns for the welfare of her beloved scarecrow can be taken quite in earnest, though readers’ emotions may be genuinely aroused, to a limited extent, when, amid choice comments placed near the ending of the story, she commits her unfortunate scarecrow back again to his former occupation in the fields. Up to a point, the text invites readers to resist a one-sided appreciation of the meaning and implications of what they have been reading. The downfall of her protégé whose career in the world she has attempted to further is a cruel disillusion for both the witch and, most pathetically, for the manikin itself that had gained from the adventure a persuasive sense of agency, a first experience of a relatively independent life on its own and the incipient self-awareness of an apprentice young-man-about-town in a novel of education.

  • 4 Hawthorne’s text may well function as a perfect antidote to the notorious anecdote about the rivalr (...)

5The text, however, is not designed to celebrate the triumph of lifelikeness contrary to the tradition of artistic literature, replete with anecdotes extolling its virtues. The scarecrow, from the start a dubious assemblage of miscellaneous bits and pieces, has gained consistency with the development of the story, come to life right under the readers’ eyes and rises to the status of a human character blessed with a degree of psychological depth; he has been elevated to the flimsy magnificence of life at the top, then been abruptly demoted to revert to his previous lower condition as a hodgepodge of old things and cheap articles, sadly cobbled together by force of witchcraft to resemble a sedulous, if pathetically roguish, suitor that Mother Rigby manipulates for purposes of petty revenge, or the settling of secret old accounts. In a climactic mirror scene (281-82) that ruins his chances of subjugating his designated paramour and hurts the feelings he did not know he had, he eventually appears to the girl’s eyes and his own for the sad, mixed lot of scraps that he is and ever has been. Having repaired to Mother Rigby’s place to confess his failure, he becomes even more human when he comes to admit he is a mere jumble of accumulated waste and discarded things, and nothing beyond that. The shock of recognition having disabled him, he is no longer a suitable candidate for life or lifelikeness and is presently sent back to officiate in his former humble capacity as a crude, uncouth, and lifeless imitation of a man, just good enough to scare birds, not deceive them,4 let alone beguile those human creatures Mother Rigby considers are his mere counterparts or peers, flesh and blood versions of her preposterous scarecrow who just happen to be quick with frivolous life on this our side of the looking glass.

  • 5 The complexity of demands for a high degree of resemblance and vividness in portraiture in pre- and (...)

6In a story running its course half-way between literature and life, splicing waggishness with gravity, the narrator tells a fable designed to be fancifully earnest or earnestly fanciful, in which he attempts to both figure and disfigure the ambition displayed by any art (including, in the present instance, one of the black arts) of achieving lifelikeness in/through a material image, and, in this respect, there is a degree of displaced similarity between the serious ambitions of high art and the mischievous doings of a gamesome, playful-minded old crone indulging her repressed longings for cheap fun through witchery; the both of them pretending to conjure up nothing less than lifelikeness (subsequently exacerbated into life) within a material artefact where previously there was no life at all, just dead matter. Art, witchcraft and fiction thus share the capacity of asserting the power of instilling what, in extreme cases, could be called “life itself” into the substance of any material image5 (said to be) fabricated with that purpose in mind. The story will not, however, quite endorse the purpose nor make it credible. There is the resulting messy letdown at the end to prove it and, more importantly, there are some explicit remarks of the narrator’s that plainly assimilate Mother Rigby’s scarecrow to the somewhat “lukewarm and abortive characters” that “have so overpeopled the world of fiction”—including Hawthorne’s own tales, as in an authorial voice he seems to be confessing (272). The narrator thus invalidates the capacity of his own story and of storytelling in general to fabricate a form of life and arouse genuine emotions in readers when it goes out to question evidence of its own powers, as here when it puts forward incriminating statements tending to make fictive discourse cancel itself out, simultaneously claiming for itself the ability to generate a sense of sprightly animation that will reflect the exuberant vibrance of life through the narrative dynamics of fiction, and eventually denying itself the faculty of ever effectively vindicating its existence by achieving the purpose it has originally set forth for itself: not just imitate but duplicate life itself. All it can do is make a story about it and circulate it to make it public lore, and there will always be an audience of one kind or another to literally believe it.

7Where such life comes from remains as indefinite as the origin of the magic coal that Mother Rigby calls for to light up her pipe. This sort of inconclusive statement declares the convergence existing between the witch’s magic arts and storytelling’s putative power to give life: in neither case is any source assigned to that power or those arts, but fiction is always exempt from the obligation, and need not do so because it carries with it a built-in assumption that within the precinct of fiction anything can pretend to life.

Lifelikeness: Trite of Miraculous?

  • 6 The celebration of the development of the power of art by way of the astonishing accomplishments of (...)
  • 7 Hawthorne’s text is a likely contributor to the emergence of this peculiar, new, and typically Amer (...)

8By comparison with Hawthorne’s “Feathertop,” the Pygmalion story is considerably less flippant in its tone, much more limited in its scope, and in a manner of speaking more utilitarian because it repeatedly emerges where it is most relevant and effective, in the field of art literature, as a convenient fable designed to promote the dignity of art by emphasizing the peculiar wonder-working accomplishments of the artist.6 It is a piece of narrative fiction about art’s capability to create what amounts to “life” by exceeding the acknowledged empirical qualities of whatever stuff it uses for its material. No longer so in “Feathertop”: the artistic enhancement of marvels and wonders yields to the telling of some preposterous quirk about the practice of witchcraft for fun and profit; fiction is shown dealing with its own fictive power to build up a likely candidate for lifelikeness from a cluttered collection of almost anything, to the point of including “life itself” among the aims it contemplates.7

9What is reported as the measure of a miraculous and wonderful achievement of the artist in art literature of the Pygmalion sort thus turns out to be a trite, commonplace feature of any narrative text employing and asserting the ordinary powers of fictive animation that are standard to its definition. Lifelikeness, life itself, are not things the fiction writer should be particularly cunning to call upon, skillful to handle or a paragon of the craft to accomplish. They only seem to become problematic and demanding matters when the field covered by the narrative comes to be restricted to objects or figures specifically designated or categorized as figures of art. Being what it is, the common run of narrative fiction is, broadly speaking, never committed to respectful observance of the physical limitations ascribed to the inert material objects it may address and, by its own logic, exonerate from their physical properties, should they be selected for attention within its confines.

10In matters of fiction, anything goes, and any reader/spectator is susceptible to an inverse relation between faith and realism that has long been observed, including in the visual arts. Georg W. F. Hegel makes this point in his Aesthetics:

  • 8 Ernst Gombrich discusses David Freedberg’s conception of the respective roles of spectator’s percep (...)

Any poor figure is adequate provided only it reminds one of the subject it is intended to signify. For this reason, piety is also satisfied with poor images and will always worship Christ, Mary or any Saint in the merest daub. (qtd. in Gombrich)8

  • 9 For a rich compendium on renewed conceptions of “agalma,” see the collection edited by Stéphane Dug (...)

In the same way, it has been determined that the Greek word for “statue,” “agalma,” “agalmata” in the plural, did not, in most instances of its use, refer exclusively to an anthropomorphic statue, but to any material object that was likely to be employed as the element at the center of worshipping practices to establish contact with the gods. The phrase “A beautiful agalma” may apply to a vase, to a weapon whatever it is or to any object as small as a fragment or as large as the Trojan horse, provided it can be regarded as precious and of great value owing to the reputation it has gained or is likely to attain, not just because it is made of expensive material such as gold or marble.9

  • 10 On the re-discovery of the “It-narrative” and a study of its main features, see the books by Mark B (...)

11Hawthorne was similarly aware that the power of narrative fiction writing was such that it could call upon common, ordinary, or mean objects to occupy center stage in a story. He could and probably did rely on relatively recent historical precedents to write up such a narrative in which the main protagonist is not a human being, not even a biological entity. The tale’s (undeclared?) frame of reference, the idea it develops of human actions performed by that compendium of incongruous old things parading as a scarecrow-turned-gentleman, has a close kinship with a type of narrative that ignores the human difference from things and animals. Things come alive and act and talk in what is now known as the “It-narrative,” also known as the “object narrative” or the “Novel of Circulation,” that first appeared in England in the 1750s and 1760s. The phrase coined to describe such narratives is quite appropriate: it refers to prose fictions that revolve around non-human characters, things, or animals turned tellers of tales that raise questions about the distinctively human aspect of storytelling and about the notions of the self so central to definitions of the form when it is assumed that it originates with a human agent. In these tales, personified things and anthropomorphized animals dislodge humans from center stage, usurping the first-person consciousness and self-reflexivity of autobiography in order to expose a world governed and animated by nonhuman forces: things—coins, clothing, coaches, walking-canes, and writing implements—as well as animals—cats, dogs, birds, mice, and vermin—began to recount the histories of their lives in the first person. These instances of autobiographical narratives were organized around a thing or an animal, not a human being. Shifting from bandits’ lair to aristocratic boudoir, the nonhuman narrators of these texts offer serial portraits of the lives, histories, and characters of the people they encounter. These are peripatetic narrators moving from domestic spaces above and below stairs, through the public domains of life, church, market, street, tavern, theatre, or palace. In that series of immensely popular tales, coins, clockwork, coaches, garments, pens, pets, pests, and what-not advertised in their respective titles all assume a speaking part; they recount stories from the point of view and in the voice that fiction ascribes to inanimate things or animals.10

The Threefold “Paragone”: Sculpture, Painting, Storytelling

12To not just imitate human life in an iconic representation, but duplicate life itself, not necessarily in human guise, is an overweening conceit that a text is always at risk of endorsing as its own when the story it relates involves a statue or work of art that comes alive. This kind of artistic feat lies at the heart of Hawthorne’s “Drowne’s Wooden Image”: Drowne has made a reputation for himself as a very able craftsman whose designs of weathervanes and figureheads are the signal ornament of a goodly number of buildings on land and of quite a few ships at sea. Though unrivaled in this line, Drowne, as it turns out, is no first-rate artist: a certain clumsy rigidity and rustic awkwardness are consistently imparted to whatever figure his hands happen to fashion. Most seem to be “wooden” in more ways than one, not just owing to the material he carves his figures out of (wood) but also owing to the overall stiffness of his graceless style of work that suits his trade as a popular/vernacular carver, but imparts to his figures none of the vividness expected in a true work of art. Still, what purports to be the oakwood figurehead intended to decorate the prow of the good ship Cynosure will be the exception that proves the rule: it astonishes no less an artist than John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) and appears as nothing short of miraculous to a host of more ordinary visitors paying their call at Drowne’s workshop. For indeed, on this one occasion, that particular figure of the beautiful woman that Drowne has carved looks inordinately lively and quickly earns the reputation of having come alive when captain Hunewell is seen walking around through the streets of Boston arm in arm with the lady, whose image he has commissioned. Yet, this is a short-lived miracle. Subsequently falling back into his predictable manner of yore, never again does Drowne achieve such a degree of vivacity in any one of his wooden figures.

  • 11 The poem in question is the first stanza in Michelangelo’s “rime” (sonnet) n° 151 (1538-1544): “Non (...)

13A belated if pedestrian equivalent of the most sublime artistic figure in Renaissance Italy, and substituting wood for marble, Drowne makes a declaration patterned after one of Michelangelo’s poems: he must find the figure that lies latent in the piece of oak he has been working on. This figure lying hidden beforehand in the material is not the artist’s own personal invention. Not derived from the artist’s mental conception, let alone his imagination, it is a pre-existing prototype that lies in abeyance, dormant within the confines of a suitable piece of hard material (wood or marble) before an artist with the capacity to recognize it for what it is carries out the requisite artistic operations.11

14For Michelangelo, these operations will make the living figure appear in and through the solid massiveness of the marble; the so-called “genius of the artist” consists in chipping away with his chiselat the hard material that yields to fit the shape it serves to reveal while preserving its preexisting integrity.

  • 12 At this stage, I leave out any discussion of a major point of complexity involved in Hawthorne’s de (...)

15The tale as it develops shows Drowne’s idea to be a different and far more ambiguous affair resting on notions quite alien to the Renaissance vision it purports to reinstate or reinvent. The prospective sculptural artefact is described as the kind of creature/entity that has been awaiting revelation or liberation within the shapeless block of wood; the artist knows how to recognize it and has been aware of its presence before he fashions it into existence, expressing a potential for life, or lifelikeness, that can be taken for granted because it resides as an implicit power in the matter the prospective artwork is made of. Not a mere figment of the artist’s power of imagination, nor emanated from his conscious, elaborate project, the artefact reveals, prior to its actual manifestation, a built-in capacity for agency inherent in its component material, provided such material encounters the right hand at the right time to enact its latent capacity for full development. In this context, the work of art resulting from the artist’s labors carries with it the aura of a self-determined existence because even prior to its coming into the world as a marvelous artefact, it was constitutively emancipated from the artist’s capacity for invention, with the appropriate narrative creating and upholding an assumption that it existed on its own even before it became visible or an object for the spectator’s senses.12

  • 13 Hawthorne displays an almost permanent fascination with the full-bodied presence of sculpture as op (...)
  • 14 It is impossible to dwell here on the development of the problematics of “lifelikeness” as they kee (...)

16The text, however, is not so forcefully worded as to invite us to endorse a vitalist-materialist conception of Drowne’s notion of the three-dimensional artwork. Something else interferes with the “three-dimensional” aspect of the sculpture, and that is the presence in the story of a distinguished painter of Copley’s standing. This factor readers should bear in mind to realize that, in this context, the lifelikeness of Drowne’s lady is likely to emulate that of one of his painted portraits, of necessity a combination of visual effects resulting from the painter’s own skill; such is the case in the magnificent pictures produced by a talented portrait painter of high reputation like Copley. The “lifelikeness” relating to Copley’s judgement is that of a two-dimensional image and Copley’s appreciation of Drowne’s achievement amounts to saying that this sculpture of Drowne’s happens to live up to the same standards as those of a portrait painted in his, Copley’s, usual, brilliant manner. However, the lifelikeness of a portrait belongs with the material constraints of the image; it is an iconic lifelikeness that has been communicated to a two-dimensional image by the skill of the artist, despite (not to say against) the limitations and flatness of the medium.13 In the case of Drowne’s figurehead, things are different: the artist does not “create” the resemblance in the artefact. Once we admit that a form of life already belongs within the material substratum of a sculpture, such life gains a manner of ontological priority over the phenomenon of semblance or imitation of life that characterizes the visual effect of a painted likeness. Still, the life that animates a living sculpture is assumed to be coextensive to the material, three-dimensional fulness of its presence as a three-dimensional object in space. It therefore enjoys the privilege of sharing in all the known dimensions of our familiar world, including three-dimensional coordinates in the case of sculpture in the round fully detached from a background.14

17This is not to imply that the narrative fully endorses such a “theory,” but neither does it give a key to answer these questions: how then do we shift (or have shifted) from the lifelikeness that pertains to portraiture onwards to “life itself” when the sculptured artefact supposedly comes alive? When lifelikeness seems to jump out of itself so emboldened that it reaches out for the hyperbolic notion of “life itself” as the ultimate achievement of an artwork, two distinct but concomitant factors act/have necessarily been acting in combination: cynosure and storytelling.

Cynosure and Storytelling

18Cynosure is the name of the ship the sculpted and painted lady is destined to decorate the prow of in the capacity of a figurehead. It is a plausible and not unbecoming name for a ship: it refers to the northern constellation of Ursa Minor, an important navigational aid for mariners because it includes Polaris, or the North Star, the brightest in the constellation. The word is also used figuratively for anything or anyone that is the focus of attention or observation as in the set phrase “the cynosure of all eyes” which is what the lady becomes in the course and even more so in the final sections of the narrative. Her deliberate perambulation around the city makes her an object for general attention, and her assertive presence is fodder for public knowledge. Once it has become a public fact that there is such a lady around who does carry upon herself an obvious resemblance to the highly publicized figure of the statue, the narrative may be construed to suggest, but does not confirm, let alone assert, that the whole show of the lady and the captain is a downright fabrication and has been carefully staged. Yet the narrative endorses neither of these two options: the first option is that the resemblance is true and just a matter of chance and circumstances; the second is that the lady’s and captain’s whereabouts have been calculated to maximize effect and support the idea of a miraculous occurrence with the authority of fact.

19Taken at first sight, the narrative fails to keep the balance even between the two options. It is so organized that its manner of telling the events clearly seems to establish priorities. The telling occurs in the very same order that is sure to ratify the second option, if that is what is expected: the two protagonists have publicly performed in reverse order, after the statue’s growing reputation has eclipsed the notion that it was just a conventional, if richly decorated, figurehead. If narrative construction has determined that the lady’s and captain’s promenade is the last thing that will be told, the statue will (narratively speaking) have been carved ahead of the lady’s walk about town, and said lady is bound to appear next as a plausible flesh-and-blood avatar of her true, pre-existent sculptural self, with the hyperbolic rumor about a living statue a short step ahead.

20The narrative replicates the lady’s and captain’s public rehearsal, while giving up the capacity to dismiss it as an instance of arrant fictiveness, but never denying that it might be one. By virtue of its own arrangement, the narrative may have duplicated the predictable effect of the lady’s and the captain’s masquerade prearranged for retroactive effect; simultaneously, however, it exhibits a dearth of corroboration, one way or the other. The narrative conspicuously fails to bear out as facts or foreground (highlight?) as fakes the occurrences it refers to, extending to itself the uncertainty regarding the possibility that it just replicates as fiction a preexisting fictive rehearsal merely by arranging its telling the way it does: in other words, the narrative might well be a “twice-told tale.” Itself a piece of fiction, it never offers to vouch for the status (fictive or otherwise) of the events it relates, neither does it contemplate the likelihood of refutation. The result is the paradox of a potentially truthful piece of fiction, if fiction it be, because no indication is offered, by way of the narrator or otherwise, that an improbable story could be disproved or disbelieved. The paradox also intensifies if it should encounter the kind of audience interested in believing it and in making anyone else believe that they believe it, and that there is no conceivable reason why it should not be perfectly acceptable to do likewise.

Corroboration De-Emphasized

21As any tale following in the footsteps of the Pygmalion episode, the story celebrates a statue by questioning its status as a purely material object. In order to exonerate it from the onus of mere solid or stolid materiality, the statue is, early in the process, declared to be by no means an ordinary piece of stonework shaped to take on the aspect of a woman that could be seductively attractive, if only it were alive. As the next stage is on its way to and approaching completion, the artefact has virtually come alive. A second-tier story, undeclared as such, has come in to supplement the prior one with implicit indications that it circulates abroad for the benefit of all and sundry and is told at a second remove as a matter of public belief, not as something imagined by a single or even a multiple human subject. Here as elsewhere in Hawthorne’s tales, when allowed by the narrator to have their say, witnesses cannot agree as to the reality of the story, its implications and where it all originates, or express a definite opinion about it. As a result, the telling of the story is as impersonal as it possibly can be, and the tale strives to provide as few specifics as it can about place or historical circumstances. The shunning of historical causality is consonant with Drowne’s artistic masterstroke as a one-of-a-kind affair that clearly will not bear repetition. The one and only manifestation of his short-lived, unacknowledged talent occurs on that single occasion, eschewing the possibility of putting things in perspective or tracing the narrative back to any identified source, historical precedent, or subsequent reiteration.

22Narrative information is here communicated by way of a mode of revelation that paradoxically contains a factor of obfuscation. Surely it is too much to say that the text mystifies its readers, but so it does to a certain extent because the status of the narrative discourse used for the telling of the story is almost constantly problematic; readers are hardly ever in a position to determine who or what speaks and from what standpoint. The narrative voice de-emphasizes potential differences borne of inconspicuous deflections in the type or nature of the information it provides and in the manner of providing it. It thereby avoids committing itself to the equivalent of a definite or ascertainable statement about a plurality of perspectives. Not that they are quite absent. But they are bound to remain disregarded and unacknowledged because of this work of narrative downplaying: it consists in eliminating, undermining or understating any indication as to the relevance or value of alternative angles of vision. They are still capable of being detected from unexpressed indications, erased yet not utterly deleted, but they do seem missing from the picture if readers are not prepared to make them their cynosure, to place them at the center of their attention, a move that the text decidedly never encourages.

23Preventing disclosure or recognition in this way creates a situation that nullifies our efforts of attention, and we find ourselves appropriately incapacitated to make sense of what is involved in our focusing of consciousness on the “cynosure of all eyes”: what has effectively become of the lady/ living statue remains undecided. The word then turns out to be ironically apposite as its ambiguity reveals itself. Its two distinct meanings begin to communicate: by narrowing the field of our attention on the lady/statue (meaning #2), we have lost our bearings in the narrative and through it (meaning #1), and by the end of the story our comprehension of our position, environment, or situation as readers is compromised.

The Politics of Lifelikeness. Attention, Imagination, and Democratic Power

24At the heart of “Drowne’s Wooden Image” lies a cognitive challenge: the telling of the story undermines what it purports to build up, with readers seemingly invited to focus their attention on the expectation of some predictably glorious achievement by an artist or practitioner of art, along the lines of artistic literature geared towards the build-up and edification of an audience of admirative viewers. However, the mode of narration reveals a degree of elusiveness, if not of inscrutableness, in the significance of the artistic enterprise under consideration. In various ways indicated above, the telling of the story discreetly invalidates the figure it puts forward as a main object of attention, but the story as told is no counter-narrative. It offers no obvious alternative to the confusing state of affair that readers are left with after their reading.

25This should not come as a surprise. Hawthorne’s narratives rarely replicate the model or models they are patterned after. Nor do they assert, state, or understate anything regarding postulates or inferences likely to offer or suggest a different course or conception. The two texts analyzed in the present contribution, “Feathertop” and “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” are no exceptions. They are storytelling enterprises that foreground rather marginal figures and tell entertaining if twisty/contorted little stories that hardly rise above the level of anecdotes, a compact form of narrative well suited to the demands of magazine publication but possibly elusive in its implications. Assuming that Hawthorne’s texts were indeed conceived as anecdotes, the etymology of the word indicates that a text of this type consists in an “unpublished” and by extension “secret “or “undisclosed” piece of information, suggesting that there might well be an unrevealed meaning to the story, but not necessarily of the kind that is compromised by disclosure, and loses interest once it starts circulating abroad. The permanent problem with an anecdote, however, is that it never carries with it indications about a or the definite context in which it would gain a degree of direct or indirect significance and relevance. The anecdote will not gain such significance if and when placed in the “right” context, historical, textual, or otherwise; rather, any context as it may occur, be arranged or fabricated and is elaborate enough in its implicitness or allusiveness may happily combine elusiveness and allusiveness to gain and offer an occasional though by no means certain intimation, communicated by the anecdote, of something at stake in the circumstances of its apparition.

26In this regard, Hawthorne’s notion of an animated scarecrow can be a case in point, and may well come to load the text with unsuspected political significance when traced back to a notorious passage turned famous quote in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan where the author associates a scarecrow with the belief in ghosts and imaginary beings:

But to what purpose, may some man say, is such subtlety in a work of this nature, where I pretend to nothing but what is necessary to the doctrine of government and obedience? It is to this purpose, that men may no longer suffer themselves to be abused by them that by this doctrine of “separated essences,” built on the vain philosophy of Aristotle, would fright them from obeying the laws of their country, with empty names; as men fright birds from the corn with an empty doublet, a hat, and a crooked stick. (303)

Hobbes had an absolutist vision of the obedience of a citizen to the state. The power of Hobbes’s multifarious monarch was in no way to be challenged by the ecclesiastical and philosophical endorsement of inconsistent spiritual (i.e. imaginary) powers which were mere manifestations of obscurantism (derived from wrongheaded Aristotelian conceptions) that he turns to ridicule. Hence the image of the scarecrow, though he refrains from using the term; instead, he itemizes all the component parts of the bugaboo, thus duly kept apart so that his critical discourse should not be construed as lending life to the creature. When Hawthorne selects a scarecrow for the main subject of his tale, the absolutist assumption that prospectively grants authority and power in earnest to immaterial beings has been dismissed, and his political stance would be democratic, with the scarecrow not just an empty doublet but a living if fictive creature in a story that never demands the commitment of belief, or any act of trust or fidelity. The life and the demise of Hawthorne’s scarecrow are disconnected from obligations for the writer and the reader, and the democratic author, who has the freedom of the land of fiction, need not explicitly concern himself with political standards to regulate his production. Democratic freedom is the (unacknowledged) precondition for the possibility of fiction narratives. Not that literature and politics are better off when kept apart, just the reverse in fact: hence literature may and does legitimately introduce secret or inconspicuous reminders about the imaginary nature of political stakes, especially when they regard the fate of the Nation.

27The point would seem consistent with what is generally known of Hawthorne’s skeptical politics regarding the nature of the Union, and the conception of the political nature of American democracy as largely a creation of narratives that serve to confer a form of imaginative existence upon it. In such a context, one object, should it become (as in “Drowne’s Wooden Image”) our “cynosure” and should we trust it, may turn highly significant. Focusing upon the object in question will reward us with fresh, undisclosed significance, while we realize that we are also thereby focusing our attention on the power of that act of focusing as it creates for us the object we consider with especial care and attention. Bearing in mind that the cynosure is simultaneously an act of attention and the object emerging from that act does not, however, quite dissipate the indeterminate status of the object. It retains a degree of haziness that has been there from the start, being a minor bear, the least conspicuous in the pair of celestial bears, and “the little dipper,” its rather prosaic denomination in popular parlance that underplays the cosmic dimension of a dignified celestial object which, in this capacity, has been for centuries a major bearing for navigators. For readers of the period when the text was published, an additional meaning may have accrued as the name could also reverberate symbolically in the political order. The northern star is the true guide, when compared to any other star or group of stars, in the heavens and in the flag of the U. S., especially as those southern stars are so totally irrelevant when it comes to giving useful indications concerning the right direction the ship of state should take. But then, there is that one star which has been selected for special attention, and it therefore signifies the potential for union, so that all eyes should converge upon it, along with the consciousness of all men. Yet then, there are perils concealed in trusting that star overmuch; it is so ambiguous, and whoever puts excessive trust in it may live to rue it.

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Notes

1 Bibliography on the Pygmalion phenomenon is vast. An idea of how extensive it is can be gained from Essaka Joshua. Critics have noted that references to Pygmalion appear piecemeal in many Hawthorne texts, particularly “The Birthmark” (1843), “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), and “The Snow Image” (1851).

2 If the critical literature on eighteenth-century hair-fashion is something to go by, the so-called “feathertop” wig was a favorite with modish or fashion-conscious parsons (perhaps also with certain sportsmen). It is ironic that a witch’s magic offspring should be thus christened after a fancy article and unofficial adornment to a clergyman’s gear; a possible implication is that Mother Rigby’s husband was a parson or minister who had married her, though she was a witch. I have not been able to locate a visual source showing this specific type of wig; printed sources refer to it as a mildly extravagant affair: “FASHION in ev’ry thing bears sov’reignsway,/ And words and periwigs have both their day;/ . . . The Tyburn scratch, thick club, and Temple tye,/ The parson’s feather-top, frizz’d broad and high!” (qtd. in Festa, “Fashion” 58).

3 This sketchy outline can be found under “January 4, 1839” in The American Notebooks (185). Ten years later, a further entry under “March 16, 1849,” more detailed though still sketchy and no less off-kilter, looks more like a preliminary version of the published tale (286). A short, early overview of possible other sources in Hawthorne’s works can be found in the article by Alfred A. Kern. I have not made use of the possible broader nineteenth-century historical sources mentioned and studied in Deana Fernie’s book-length monograph; the relevance of the impressively documented developments in the book is not always warranted by the specificity of textual studies.

4 Hawthorne’s text may well function as a perfect antidote to the notorious anecdote about the rivalry between the two ancient Greek painters of the fifth century BC, Parrhasius and Zeuxis, as told by the Elder Pliny in his Historia Naturalis, Book XXXV, chapter 36 (or sometimes 29, depending on editions). In this pictorial contest, the imitative picture of grapes by Zeuxis was so perfect that birds themselves were deceived and pecked at the painted fruit; but Parrhasius exhibited a painted curtain that deceived Zeuxis who had demanded the curtain should be drawn aside. Zeuxis admitted he had been defeated because Parrhasius deceived an artist and not just the birds. See the article by M. Coulombe for an interesting account of the evolution of the notions and concepts used in the study of images, especially in recent years.

5 The complexity of demands for a high degree of resemblance and vividness in portraiture in pre- and post-Revolutionary America has been documented in Caroline Culp’s dissertation and examined further in her article. The two Hawthorne narratives dealt with here tend to create a paradoxical, if not ironic, situation in which the phantasmatic predominance of sculpture, or the shift from painting to sculpture, develop into a highlighting of affinities existing between sculpture and narrative possibilities that painting seems largely to rule out when left to its own resources. For more on this point see note 7 below.

6 The celebration of the development of the power of art by way of the astonishing accomplishments of individual artists whose excellence reveals itself in their works has been the mainstay of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Artists (1550-1568) still widely regarded as the first attempt at a modern history of art because it reveals and highlights the differences in the various artists’ respective achievements, as they emerge in the course of time, making allowance for given circumstances and individual temperaments when they reach a modicum of perfection almost wholly on their own terms. On this point see the article by Jean-Phillipe Antoine.

7 Hawthorne’s text is a likely contributor to the emergence of this peculiar, new, and typically American version of the “Paragone” between visual and verbal arts that coincides with the marked opposition between Hawthorne and Poe. See Peter Gibian in his article which enhances Poe’s choice of the painter as the type of the true artist who, at the end of “The Oval Portrait,” notoriously proclaims “this is indeed life itself,” a triumphant ejaculation that the narrator comments upon right away with a blunt “She was dead.” If life, not semblance of life, is achieved, in the portrait, the painted effigy is therefore in no need of further discussion, and never mind if it severs any connection with life. Poe’s narrative is about how the creative process prior and leading to the perfected image confiscates life for art’s sake, with art a separate kingdom that makes its own dictates prevail and exists on its own, irrespective of norms and conditions beyond it. For Hawthorne, because the work of sculpture may result into a palpable, fully rounded object and not just the visual representation of an object on a flat surface, the massive materiality of especially three-dimensional (stone) sculpture presents an attraction, being so much a part of our common world that requires all manner of narrative strategies to come alive. For more on this point, see note 13 below.

8 Ernst Gombrich discusses David Freedberg’s conception of the respective roles of spectator’s perception and material qualities of an image in the identification of what the latter represents or stands for. The Hegel passage in question is from part III, section II, chapter I, 721 in the Knox edition of Hegel’s Aesthetics, a translation that differs noticeably from the version used here. I have followed Freedberg’s intuition about the persistence of lifelike animation in statues (which he calls “inherence”) and have had little use for the notion of simulacrum as developed by Stoichita in his study of the Pygmalion myth because it seems to me incompatible with the notion that life/likeness can be critically apprehended and still be contemplated as something more than an illusory or deceptive phenomenon.

9 For a rich compendium on renewed conceptions of “agalma,” see the collection edited by Stéphane Dugast et al. and the article by Nicole Lanérès. The Greek term “agalma” (άγαλμα) has long been routinely translated as “statue.” However, literary, archeological, and epigraphic surveys of the term’s usage conducted in the last ten or fifteen years tend to indicate that among ἀγάλματα may be ranked almost any kind of object, large or small, precious or not so valuable. Summoning a god to whom the object has been dedicated involves no attempt at a tentative figuration of the god nor does it necessarily exhibit an anthropomorphic resemblance to any human creature. Inscriptions on artefacts, be they up to the standards of artistic quality or not, literally tell the story of how the god is strongly invited to approve the object concerned as his own, and as a suitable offering, no matter what shape it takes and what material it may be made of. A simplistic way of explaining Hawthorne’s interest in agalma-like objects of the kind referred to here is to say that they reach their status when supplemented by a narrative that provides reading material likely to redeem the objects it concerns from mere materiality and insignificance, thereby also elevating the narrative itself to a purpose above and beyond its paltry existence.

10 On the re-discovery of the “It-narrative” and a study of its main features, see the books by Mark Blackwell and Lynn Festa along with the articles by Jonathan Lamb and Alessio Mattana.

11 The poem in question is the first stanza in Michelangelo’s “rime” (sonnet) n° 151 (1538-1544): “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto/c’un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva/col suo superchio, e solo a quello arriva/la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto” (“The most excellent artist does not conceive an idea/ that a mere marble block does not prior in itself enclose/ with excess, and that is only reached/by the hand obeying the intellect”). The implication is that there is an excess of matter in the material block that precludes manifestation of the idea enclosed in it; the hand of the sculptor, practicing the subtractive (v. additive) variety of his art, carves it out into shape by cutting away portions of the stone, and removes that matter so that the idea’s presence may assert itself as the sculptor’s hand guided by the intellect comes to uncover it. Interpretations of the sonnet commonly insist on a Petrarchan/Neo-platonician reading that seems apposite in the historical context of the Renaissance; when considered beyond the restrictions of this heavily historicist frame, the shift in meaning implied/operated by Hawthorne’s text may be validated and is compatible, not to say consistent, with the wryly humorous treatment of the more limited and utilitarian field of funereal sculpture in his sketch of 1837 “Chippings with a Chisel.”

12 At this stage, I leave out any discussion of a major point of complexity involved in Hawthorne’s defense of sculpture and distrust of painting, which goes against the grain of one of the nineteenth century’s most powerful and influential conceptions of the arts: after his visit to the Salon of 1846, Charles Baudelaire declared that sculpture was “boring”; the visual arts are bearers of modernity in so much as they elicit focus on painting and disregard of sculpture. Does Hawthorne’s predilection for the purported “archaism” of sculptural expression make him a deliberate anti-modernist and to what extent? For specific references, see Baudelaire’s text and the unfortunately too brief discussion of the problems it raises in chapter 2 of Alex Potts’s book. Baudelaire’s judgment was substantially modified in his account of the Salon of 1859.

13 Hawthorne displays an almost permanent fascination with the full-bodied presence of sculpture as opposed to the flatness of the painted portrait; in his tale of 1838 “Edward Randolph’s Portrait,” the invisible portrait of a man who betrayed his native land to serve the interests of the King of England comes out again to meet the gaze of spectators as though he were standing in more and more relief like an incomplete sculpture that cannot liberate itself from its background, and cannot gain any visibility as long as he remains a painted object that cannot reach the eye it is destined for. Hawthorne’s narrative can bring the infamous character to life again through a narrative geared towards the re-invention of a picture that turns into a (partial) relief sculpture. The complex affinities between narrative and sculpture and their life-giving power are counterbalanced by the distrust of painting reduced to itself, unredeemed by the life-giving power that narrative shares with sculpture.

14 It is impossible to dwell here on the development of the problematics of “lifelikeness” as they keep cropping up to shape The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s romance of 1858 in which characters like Myriam and Donatello become “living models . . . repeatedly defined in terms of art objects” and centuries-old statues (Auerbach 104). For a relatively recent if partial study of what is at stake in the “animation” of statues in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, see Patricia Pulham.

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Bruno Monfort, « Between It-Narratives and Agalmata: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, (In)Animate Things and the Lifelikeness of Artefacts »Journal of the Short Story in English, 85 | 2025, 193-211.

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Bruno Monfort, « Between It-Narratives and Agalmata: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, (In)Animate Things and the Lifelikeness of Artefacts »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 85 | Automn 2025, mis en ligne le 08 décembre 2025, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/4859

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Bruno Monfort

Université Paris Nanterre – CREA (EA 370)

Bruno Monfort was a professor of nineteenth-century literature at the universities of Lille and Paris-Nanterre, and a guest-researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (LARCA - CNRS). He has worked mostly on nineteenth-century literature and culture in the United States, primarily during the Antebellum period. His publications include a book on Hawthorne’s shorter texts (Le territoire du presque, Ellipses, 2000) and journal articles on Edgar Allan Poe’s tales.

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