The Marble Faun and Romantic Sociality
The true mystery in the world is the visible, not the invisible.
—Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
It must be a very dear and intimate reality for which people will be content to give up a dream.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
No one seems capable of saying or writing a sentence these days without throwing in the word actually for no apparent reason. Actually is the new like. This change in idiom might seem insignificant, but it marks a worrisome displacement, a shift from approximation to dead certainty, from coy affection to self-evident empiricism, from the surprising to the reassuring, from aesthetics to facts. Sure, actually may satisfy the psychic cravings of an age so inundated with virtuality as to starve for the real. At the same time, however, we’ve evolved into a culture of open secrets in which half-truths are told to the public, not expecting the public to buy them, but rather to invite the pleasures of figuring out the “actual” behind the smoke and mirrors, a phenomenon we might think of as the Woodward and Bernsteining of America. Watergate was the context for the intellectual movement that would become new historicism, which naturalized as criticism the impulse to reveal the ideological humbug lurking behind surface obfuscation. Criticism as a mode of advocacy (of “liking”) or of metaphorical inventiveness (of imagining what the world might be “like” if unfettered from the actual) was replaced by critique, the revelatory regime of discerning the truth (if only an ideological and not a Kantian variety) beneath illusion.
Given this critical genealogy, we might speculate that new historicism is the logical outgrowth not only of Watergate but of late nineteenth-century realism, which was itself a response to the aesthetic counteractuality of romanticism. If Marx can be called the first significant antiaesthetic historicist of the postromantic period, his heirs, through and beyond Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, have persistently yoked imperatives to “always historicize” to an acute skepticism about the ideological interpellations of aesthetic formations and affects, located, with unfailing consistency, in the “magical narratives” of the romantic era.1 This distrust of the play of surfaces is a shortcoming in social criticism because in order to imagine a society operating under more just conditions, one must be capable of imagining a social world unmoored from the binding imperative of precedent and set adrift in the speculative potential of the as-yet-only-imagined. This work of inventive imagination transforms aesthetic speculation into world-making transformation, a process Judith Butler implies when she reminds us that fantasy is not unreal but “not-yet-real,” or a discredited version of “the real.”2 If one’s lifestyle and aspirations run counter to the imperatives of normative convention, they will become discredited as whimsy, day-dreaming, ivory-towerism, delusion, and all the other terms used to neutralize the imaginative power of those who want something they haven’t seen—or seen often—except in the mind’s eye.
This is the transformative power Oscar Wilde implied in his aesthetic manifesto, “The Decay of Lying” (1889), in which the art of untruth—what we might call counteractuality—becomes a romantic act of defiance. For the essay’s protagonist, Vivian, arguably a stand-in for Wilde himself, the prime menace of late nineteenth-century realism is its relentless production of “evidence in support of a lie.”3 The realist, Vivian contends, by presenting a biased and soul-consuming concoction as an empirical and natural inevitability, fosters “a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability” (8). Vivian attributes realism’s fact fetish to the “crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals,” all of which, he claims, arises from “that country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature” (25–26).
Of course, Mason Locke Weems’s spurious 1800 account of Washington and the cherry tree was not the only aesthetic production of nineteenth-century America, as Wilde well knew, nor was Wilde’s the only articulation of the romantic imagination as a counterforce to crass materialism. “Like Emerson,” Vivian proclaims, signaling the roots of his counteractual theory in antebellum aesthetics, “I write over the door of my library the word ‘Whim’” (3). Fashioning his own aesthetic transcendence, Vivian imagines whim “breaking from the prison-house of realism” (27). For Wilde’s Artist, however, transcendent aestheticism is no transparent metaphysics, but a deliberate process that releases experience from binding precedent, generating alternatives whose appeal arises from the pleasures that “whim” encourages and that “reality” seeks to curtail. Turning superficial artifice threateningly serious, Wilde claims that while Art “begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent,” soon enough “Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment” (20). Dissatisfied with the mortifying imperatives of reality, Art reveals a greater truth in “things that are lovely and that never happen,” or in “things that are not and that should be” (51). Responding pleasurably to art, one not only disavows what is natural and hence inevitable, moreover, but also joins a “charmed circle,” a sub- or counterculture. Pleasure then becomes the affective adhesive binding individual aesthetic experience to collective social relations—made of the “rough materials” of reality but not bound to its purportedly inherent values—that prove more hospitable to those “whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues” (20). Although “reality” ultimately “gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness” (20), the transformative power of invention—what Wilde expresses simply as “romanticism”—can never be fully contained or silenced. “Life goes faster than Realism,” Vivian asserts, “but Romanticism is always in front of Life” (53). When romance, “with her temper of wonder, will return to the land,” Vivian predicts, the “very aspect of the world will change to our startled eyes” (51).
Realists of our own age, as I’ve already suggested, have continued the skepticism and disregard of the world-transformative potential of romantic aesthetics, accusing writers like Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe of ignoring the “real” ideological struggles of their day. More disturbing, however, are those who have taken up the recent “return” to aesthetics, but have ignored Wilde and his aphoristic, pleasure-seeking, and counteractual followers, as if “queer style” played no role in nineteenth-century aestheticism. The “straightening” of aesthetic theory suggests an uneasiness with what Michel Foucault has claimed is most disturbing in homosexuality, not sex “itself,” but the values that structure the subcultures generated and maintained through Wildean aesthetics: “everything,” as Foucault writes, “that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force.” Foucault makes explicit what Wilde leaves implicit: that the work of aesthetic transformation, undertaken by queers (those possessed of “monstrous and marvelous vices”), is ultimately “a way of life,” a social ascesis, an ethics.4 It’s not that friendship is itself a substitute for social struggle or that sociality can replace socialism, but without strong social bonds struggle is less sustainable, pleasurable, or inventive. To return “queer style” to aesthetic theory is, therefore, to conceive it not as an escape from but as a powerful engagement with social aspiration (the aspiration to be social) and collaborative invention. That work, as Wilde shows, demands that we develop the skills not only of critique—of discovering and analyzing the actual—but of creation, of the powers to imagine what has not-yet-been, what’s been left untried or banished from the thinkable to the interior states of fantasy, daydreaming, reverie, and, as Wilde would have it, art.
While we have not previously considered the antebellum United States as a hothouse of queer aesthetics, Wilde’s Vivian saw himself working within romanticism, from which he drew his inspiration for how “abstract decoration” and “whimsy,” “unreal and non-existent,” can transform realist morality into counteractual sociability. In order to move from realist critique to inventive reconstruction, we must revisit, as Wilde did, romanticism’s visionary promise of a more generous, radically expansive intimacy: not intimacy judged by the criteria of institutions (abstracted character, mutual knowledge, self-sacrifice, and longevity), but intimacy judged by its relation to aesthetics.5 That promise is perhaps most evident, as the following discussion of The Marble Faun will show, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s aesthetic experimentation and his fantasy, no less serious for being fantasy, of social relations released from the internal confines of consciousness through the aesthetic imagination.
What makes The Marble Faun exemplify romanticism’s social aesthetics is not, as is often asserted, its location outside the United States. It is certainly true that its Italian setting—redolent with ruined antiquity, robust superstitions, and mystic Catholicism—indexes, sometimes in an orientalist register, Hawthorne’s characteristically romantic features, providing what Henry James yearned for in Hawthorne’s work: a “crepuscular realm of the writer’s own reverie” distinct from “the vulgar, many-coloured world of actuality.”6 Releasing Americans from the “iron rule” of the Protestant work ethic that demanded “an object and a purpose in life” and that turned all humans into “parts of a complicated scheme of progress, which can only result in our arrival at a colder and drearier region than we were born in” (215), Italy, however, is more a frame of mind than a geopolitical locale.7 That “foreign” fantasy, where “progress” gives way to unpredictable countertemporal reversals of modernity and antiquity, and where superstition, myth, and belief challenge clear-sighted pragmatism, is exemplified by Hawthorne’s young count, Donatello, who evokes for the Americans the mythic faun of the title. A “lawless thing” who possesses “an indefinable character” (11) and who “has nothing to do with time” (12), Donatello, at once “evanescent and visionary” (4), enacts “no strict obedience to conventional rules” (12). Little wonder that all the Americans, yearning to mix “the Real and the Fantastic” (417), fall in love first with Rome and then with Donatello.
More significant than its Italian setting, however, are two additional features that have been less often noted: the novel’s focus on same-sex friendship and its attachment of those friendships to aesthetic theory. The Marble Faun is the first of Hawthorne’s romances to emphasize same-sex friendship rather than heterosexual romance. While the love between Donatello and Miriam is an important plot element, it receives less narrative attention than the friendships between Miriam and Hilda or between Kenyon and Donatello. “We taste one intellectual pleasure twice, and with double the result,” Hawthorne writes, “when we taste it with a friend” (296), and if this is true of “intellectual pleasures” in general, it proves truest, in The Marble Faun, of the pleasures of romanticism. Hawthorne frees his characters from “all customary responsibilities for what they thought and said” (12), not to make them transcendental individualists, or even solitary aesthetes, but to enhance the possibilities for inventive intimacies. As Hawthorne seemed to realize, it is not simply, as Foucault speculated, that friendship generates new social ethics, but that those ethics must first be invented through critical romanticism, though acts of inscription and interpretation, for friendship to flourish. We might call such a readiness for inventive friendship romanticism’s intimation.
Hawthorne raises this possibility from the opening of The Marble Faun, which begins, as do his other romances, with an instructive preface. Unlike his earlier prefaces, “addressed nominally to the Public at large,” Hawthorne offers The Marble Faun to “a character with whom he felt entitled to use far greater freedom.” “He [the author] meant it for that one congenial friend—more comprehensive of his purpose, more appreciative of his successes, more indulgent of his short-comings, and, in all respects, closer and kinder than a brother—that all-sympathising critic, in short, whom an author never actually meets, but to whom he implicitly makes his appeal, whenever he is conscious of having done his best” (xxiii). Friendship relies, for Hawthorne, on appreciative reading, on a sensibility unusually attuned to intimacy and to aesthetics. But pause on actually in this opening: Hawthorne uses the word to lift sociability—friendship—from the realm of everyday proximity (someone one actually meets) to that of fantasy, the projection of an author’s aesthetic and intimate aspirations. Despite his reference to the “actual,” then, friendship, for Hawthorne, is profoundly counteractual.
At first, Hawthorne represents his ideal reader as an unattainable ideal, not surprisingly so given what the sculptor Kenyon says within the romance about attainable intimacy between men: “‘between man and man,” Kenyon states, “there is always an insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other’s hands; and therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart-sustenance, from his brother man’” (258). Kenyon assumes that, because there are gaps—moments of absence, mystery, or autonomy—in men’s friendships, intimacy will necessarily fail. Rather than seeing an “insuperable gulf” as the opportunity for inventive fantasy, Kenyon reads it only as grievous loss. Imagining his Ideal Reader as separated from the author by temporal and spatial “gulfs,” Hawthorne seems to set up interpretive intimacy as a similarly disappointing exercise in “heart-sustenance,” a failure constitutive of the “actual.” But Hawthorne is not Kenyon. Although he begins by lamenting, “I never personally encountered, nor corresponded through the Post, with this Representative Essence of all delightful and desirable qualities which a Reader can possess,” he soon back-pedals, proclaiming that he “never therefore concluded him to be merely a mythic character” but instead maintained “always a sturdy faith in his actual existence” (xxiii–xxiv). “Actual” now signifies a potential proximity, a like-ness, a hopeful mediation between fantasy and faith, presence and potential, and necessary to the generation of art. His faith is not necessarily divorced from experience, moreover, as “that friend of friends, that unseen brother of the soul,” actually “did once exist for me and (in spite of the infinite chances against a letter’s reaching its destination, without a definite address) duly received the scrolls which I flung upon whatever wind was blowing, in the faith that they would find him out” (xxiv).
Hawthorne’s ideal reader, we might speculate, was Herman Melville, with whom, between 1850 and 1851, Hawthorne walked the Berkshire woods, talking about what Melville characterized as “possible and impossible matters.”8 Although the two men occasionally visited one another, their intimacy seems to have grown primarily, as Hawthorne’s preface suggests, through letters that, layering textual mediations, describe the men’s interpretations of each other’s literary productions. Melville first charmed Hawthorne by reviewing with superlative praise his Mosses from an Old Manse. Melville in turn received Hawthorne’s praise for Moby-Dick. As is always the case in epistolary relationships, distance and silence are as important to the interpretive inventions comprising intimacy as are the proximate grasps of the hand privileged by Kenyon. While he found Hawthorne’s letter of praise “joy-giving and exultation-breeding” (240), Melville assured his often shy friend that he required no reply to his own letter, claiming, “Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it—for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper” (241). Understanding that he changes himself in the act of reading and writing, Melville dismisses the fiction of full disclosure or even correspondence, in both senses of the word. Instead, Melville apparently enjoys that the two men’s “divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous” (240), like inspiration itself, and ephemeral (“The Gentle Reader,” Hawthorne notes in his preface, “is apt to be extremely short-lived” [xxiv]). Instantaneous and ephemeral, an unlikely investment in the future, intimacy is situated firmly in the present (the sensation aroused by Hawthorne’s praise, Melville claims, is no pledge of future satisfactions, but brings instead present satisfaction, rendering the author “Content”[240], both fictional and gratified). Characterized by ephemerality, spontaneity, immediacy, and contingency, this friendship falls beyond the pale of the institutional virtues (permanence, futurity, disclosure, and commitment) that characterize conventional intimacy, but their distance from convention made the relationship more, not less, “actual,” for, as Melville notes, “truth is ever incoherent” (241).
Out of the spaces of incoherence—of what Kenyon calls “insuperable gulfs”—Hawthorne and his Ideal Reader generated an occasion for “ineffable socialities” (240), romantic and collective self- and mutual inventions (“Lord,” Melville asks Hawthorne, “when shall we be done changing?” [241]) that transform, as Wilde predicts aesthetics will, monstrous sins into marvelous virtues (“I have written a wicked book,” Melville claims of Moby-Dick, “but I feel spotless as the lamb” [240]). It was arguably this tense proximity of presence and absence, embodiment and inscription, precedent and fantasy, sending and missing, revelation and concealment that generated for the two men what Melville called “ontological heroics” (238) or what we might call aesthetics beyond the actual.
Not surprisingly, given this experience with Melville, The Marble Faun centers on the relationship between same-sex intimacy and aesthetics, a connection that sets The Marble Faun apart from Hawthorne’s earlier texts. The novel turns on the moment when the pure and virtuous, hopelessly uptight Anglo-Saxon Hilda becomes a secret witness to a murder and, as a result, severs her close friendship with the woman she believes to be the murderer, Miriam. The mysterious, passionate, and Semitic Miriam has been stalked, throughout the novel, by a man known simply as The Model, who appears to hold the tormented artist in his power. One night, as Miriam and the simple but loyal Donatello (who has fallen in love with Miriam) gaze upon Rome from on high, they are confronted by The Model. Without a word, Donatello surmises the whole “mystery” and, lifting up Miriam’s foe, hurls him to his death. Witnessing this scene, Hilda resolves to sever her friendship with Miriam, an agonizing break for both women. As Hawthorne writes, Miriam’s “‘crime lay merely in a glance’” (421).
Yet “glancing” suggests not only witnessing but also the art of viewing, an inherently aesthetic endeavor, and in The Marble Faun there are aesthetic as well as legal crimes. Two artists, Miriam and Hilda, represent two opposing perspectives on aesthetics, both of which have debilitating effects on the women’s friendship. For Miriam, art is pure invention, generated entirely from within some dark, mysterious, largely inaccessible unconscious. Given that the “meaning” of Miriam’s work is inaccessible, even to the artist, viewers must supply their own affectively charged meaning to her creations. Miriam’s aesthetic shapes her sociability as well. Just as her emotional depth generates unconventional art, so it makes for unconventional manners. “Miriam had great apparent freedom of intercourse,” Hawthorne writes; “her manners were so far from evincing shyness, that it seemed easy to become acquainted with her, and not difficult to develop a casual acquaintance into intimacy” (17). Yet just as viewers find it impossible to discern meaning without supplying it themselves, held at bay by the unconventional aesthetics of the work, so her acquaintances find Miriam’s apparent friendliness deceptive: “By some subtle quality,” Hawthorne reports, “she kept people at a distance, without so much as letting them know that they were excluded from her inner circle” (17), so eventually people “recognize[d] the impossibility of getting nearer to Miriam, and gruffly acquiesced” (17). Just as Miriam’s art demands sympathy of comprehension from the viewer that it simultaneously frustrates, so Miriam both “demands friendship, love, and intimate communion, but is forced to pine in empty forms, a hunger of heart, which finds only shades to feed upon” (100–1).
Unlike Miriam, who paints to express deep emotional turmoil, Hilda is a copyist infatuated by the surfaces that, for her, are the locus of meaning. The effect of Hilda’s focus on surfaces was “to make her appear like an inhabitant of picture-land, a partly ideal creature, not to be handled, nor even approached too closely” (54). While her simplicity invites everyone to consider themselves her friend, “a subtle attribute of reserve … insensibly kept those at a distance who were not suited to her sphere” (54). Believing that none of her work’s meaning generates within her, Hilda also believes that viewers take meaning purely from the work’s formal “genius.” While Miriam’s art is “‘too nervous, too passionate, too full of agitation’” (103), Hilda, “working entirely from the outside, and seeking only to reproduce the surface,” can only “leave out that indefinable nothing, that inestimable something, that constitutes the life and soul through which the picture gets its immortality” (51). Having lost “the impulse of original design” (48) by viewing the Master’s work “with his own eyes” (49), Hilda became “but a finer instrument, a more exquisitely effective piece of mechanism” (51), or, as Hawthorne more caustically calls her ilk, “Guido machines or Raphaelic machines” (51). When, after viewing the murder, Hilda’s “capacity of emotion was choked up with a horrible experience” (303), she can no longer copy and loses her capacity for art making. Having moved toward Miriam’s domain of suffering interiority, Hilda becomes a “melancholy girl” grown “sadly critical” (308). Caught between her aesthetic dedication to pure form—“‘The Old Masters will not set me free’” (302), she laments—and her critical uncertainty as to “whether the pictorial art be not altogether a delusion” (303), Hilda is both emotionally and imaginatively paralyzed.
The differences between the women’s aesthetics become most evident in their diverging interpretations of Guido’s portrait of Beatrice Cenci, which Hilda is copying. Hilda reports that while she was painting the “fallen angel, fallen, and yet sinless,” she occasionally felt “as if she were trying to escape from my gaze.” Because Hilda perceives that Beatrice, like Miriam, is forever isolated by her unappeasable sorrow, she yearns to help her subject, but believes that “nothing can be done to help or comfort her, neither does she ask help or comfort, knowing the helplessness of her case better than we do” (56). Because she can see only surfaces, empathy—and hence comfort—is impossible for Hilda. She has given so much autonomy to the visual object for the production of meaning that she can imagine no agency for herself, only for the painted object, which yearns to escape observation. Miriam, on the contrary, takes meaning making back to the viewer, challenging her friend’s description of Beatrice as “sinless” by asserting, “‘This is not so plain to me’” (56). If Beatrice is an autonomous person, as Hilda suggests, she is also, for Miriam, possessed of interiority—“‘if I could only get within her consciousness’” (57), Miriam exclaims—although Miriam is separated from Beatrice as much by inscrutable inwardness as Hilda is by impenetrable superficiality.
As their debate over Beatrice’s sin demonstrates, differences in aesthetic theory generate divergent ethical systems as well. Miriam, believing that interiority dictates meaning, also believes that emotions are mitigating factors that suspend ethical categories of right and wrong. Hilda, however, believes in ethical objectivity. “But there is, I believe, only one right and one wrong,” she declares, “and I do not understand (and may God keep me from ever understanding) how two things so totally unlike can be mistaken for one another; nor how two moral foes—as Right and Wrong surely are—can work together in the same deed” (347). Where each woman locates “meaning,” in other words—either in the surface or in the interior—determines her faith in an objective and discernible moral order; for the former, interpretation of laws plays no role, their meaning being self-evident; for the latter, interpretation is everything, since truth is inaccessible and unpredictable.
These ethical-aesthetic beliefs reflect two predominant aesthetic theories of the eighteenth century. Like Hilda, who draws a rigid sense of moral order from her superficial appreciation of classics, the third Earl of Shaftesbury argued that the aesthetic senses take pleasure in finding in external objects an order and harmony that is also the order and harmony of morality. The aesthetic senses thus become, for Shaftesbury, a way to perceive the orderly morality inscribed by God. In this view of aesthetics, an external law becomes internalized through the sensory perception of a beauty that is always already the same as that law.9 In contrast, Shaftesbury’s heir, Francis Hutcheson, divorced sensory pleasure from both cognition and will, and thereby established the aesthetic and ethical theory embodied by Miriam. Not only does aesthetic appreciation internalize external law, it negates the need for self-analysis (Miriam repeatedly asks others to interpret her to herself) and from action (Miriam is inexplicably paralyzed when confronted by The Model, or indeed with any difficulty requiring resolute action). Our pleasures are not to be analyzed or acted upon, for Hutcheson, but simply experienced. No longer connected to a divine order, Hutcheson’s aesthetic experiences were less law bound, but they were similarly less social, preserved in the realm of the senses.10
Both these accounts constitute what Kant would describe as “negative” freedoms: freedom from competing claims for morality in Shaftesbury’s case and from the need to analyze or act in Hutcheson’s. But what both ultimately entail is a freedom from relationality, either between spectator and artwork in the generation of “meaning” or between persons in the generation of intimacy. Things outside the subject never change the subject: whether interiority is ordered by divine law or disordered by pleasurable passions, interiority remains inviolable, beyond the transformative “grasp” of other persons or of external objects. As the rupture in Hilda and Miriam’s friendship demonstrates, these ethical-aesthetic viewpoints threaten intimacy. Not only does Hilda’s ethical system lead her to judge Miriam without compassion and Miriam’s prevent her from understanding the moral turmoil her actions have generated for Hilda, both women’s aesthetic visions prevent the mutual understanding that would revise and correct those extremes. While Miriam’s overreliance on her own unconscious makes her overly self-dependent, her emotions never teach her anything she doesn’t already know. Hence, “all her romantic fantasies aimed at this self-same dreary termination” (29). Miriam’s imagination, like her conscience, seems stuck in a dreadful rut, returning compulsively “to run on these stones of bloodshed, in which woman’s hand was crimsoned by the stain” (38), leaving her, as she begins, alone to “brood, brood, brood” (254). When Kenyon asks, “‘With all your activity of mind … so fertile in plans as I have known you—can you imagine no method of bringing your resources into play?’” (254), the answer is unwaveringly no, for, claiming that there “is never a new group now-a-days; never, even, so much as a new attitude” (110), Miriam refuses herself the intimate nonconformity that would release her from guilt and shame. At the other end of the spectrum, but with similar results, Hilda’s complete denial of interiority gives her the impression “of being utterly sufficient to herself!” (107).
What Hilda and Miriam need, then, is a new aesthetic theory that combines rather than separates, imagines rather than judges, and acknowledges that relationships with others who maintain an alterity to our moral orders might transform, rather than confirm, our interior conceptions of truth and beauty. That theory came in the form of Friedrich von Schiller’s 1794 “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” a text central to the emergence of European—and subsequently American—romanticism. Schiller argued that the human subject is compelled simultaneously from two directions: on the one hand, pulled toward a particularizing sensuality by instinctual corporeal urges, on the other pulled by extrinsic laws that attempt to impose abstract systems onto sensuous urges. The subject is thus caught between savagery and barbarism, hedonism and totalitarianism, particularity and universalism. Unlike many Enlightenment thinkers who favored the abstract, universalizing side of these pairings, Schiller saw the need for both, particularly in an age that “far from giving us freedom, only develops, as it advances, new necessities; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us, so that the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement, and the maxims of passive obedience are held to be the highest wisdom of life.”11 In a culture of law, Schiller contends, “concrete individual life is extinguished, in order that the abstract whole may continue its miserable life, and the state remains for ever a stranger to its citizens, because feeling does not discover it anywhere” (20). Here “concrete life” is more unpredictable and fantastic than either facts or abstractions, a middle ground akin to what both Wilde and Hawthorne characterized as both romanticism and intimacy.
Accordingly, Schiller contends, the only hope is to open up “a middle state” (64) clear of the imperatives both of sense and sensibility, that being the space opened in the mind by aesthetic experiences. In aesthetics’ neutral space, the competing forces of the psyche can adjust themselves, the universal asserting its influence through the abstraction of form, the sensual infusing that form with affective life.
Man raised on the wings of imagination leaves the narrow limits of the present, in which mere animality is enclosed, in order to strive on to an unlimited future. But while the limitless is unfolded to his dazed imagination, his heart has not ceased to live in the separate, and to serve the moment. The impulse towards the absolute seizes him suddenly in the midst of his animality, and as in this cloddish condition all his efforts aim only at the material and temporal, and are limited by his individuality, he is only led by that demand of the reason to extend his individuality into the infinite, instead of to abstract from it. He will be led to seek instead of form an inexhaustible matter, instead of the unchangeable an everlasting change and an absolute securing of his temporal existence.
(87–88)
What is important for Schiller is that both happen simultaneously, so that the psyche, in its moments of aesthetic contemplation, achieves corrective harmony.
Schiller’s optimistic claim that “in the aesthetic state the most slavish tool is a free citizen” (110) might represent the illusory suturing of social divisions that, as mentioned earlier, materialist critics have claimed is endemic to aesthetics. Indeed, Schiller’s aesthetic liminality is pointedly asocial, as “a disposition of mind that removes all limitation from the totality of human nature must also remove it from every social expression of the same,” becoming, in its abstraction, “the foundation of the possibility of all” (76). I want to claim something more for Schiller, however, akin to what Judith Butler calls the force of fantasy, a force social history has notoriously neglected, but one that aesthetics has accounted for with remarkable sophistication. From the negative freedom of aesthetic space Schiller conceived a theory of the imagination or what he called play, the active enlargement of “free judgment” beyond the detached realm of art to the materiality of “a sociable character,” while also preserving, against public opinion, the “Egotism” (15) that allows imagination to flourish in defiance of common sense. Imaginative play, for Schiller, is transformative, moving beyond detached and evacuated equilibrium to a manifestation in materiality of the social principles developed in playful imaginings.
Nevertheless, in claiming that “a state of mind which comprises the whole of humanity in itself must of necessity include in itself also—necessarily and potentially—every separate expression of it” (76), Schiller renders unnecessary intimation, an aesthetics of intimate possibility, where the forces of sensuality and moral rigor or of projection and alterity might meet not as opposing halves of a self-contained consciousness but as two persons, two friends, whose interactions would open the interpretive play that constitutes, in the sphere of the social, what Schiller could conceive only intrasubjectively. Here we can return to The Marble Faun, in which Hawthorne imagines a social version of Schillerian aesthetics in which the transformative play of aesthetic imagination opens up a space of negotiable and compensatory intimacy. Artists in particular, “not wholly confined within the sordid compass of practical life” (122), move, as would Schiller’s, to “the Beautiful,” the contemplation of which partakes of “something akin to the Ideal” (122). Yet Hawthorne is careful to keep these artists from moving fully into ideality, maintaining romantic aesthetics, rather, as a mix of “the Real and the Fantastic” (417). Combining ideal form and bountiful delight, Hawthorne imagines an aesthetic play in line with Schiller’s, but with a pointedly social cast. As Hawthorne states of artists, “In every other clime, they are isolated strangers; in this Land of Art, they are free citizens” (118). In a chapter tellingly titled “An Aesthetic Company,” when artists gather, “a cheerful and airy gossip began to be heard. The atmosphere ceased to be precisely that of common life; a faint, mellow tinge, such as we see in pictures, mingled itself with the lamplight” (122). In the midst of such social gatherings, Hawthorne continues, “the imagination is not debarred from lending its assistance, even while we have the reality before our eyes, and helping the weakness of human senses to do justice to so grand an object. It requires both faith and fancy.” Combining faith and fancy, the two components of fantasy, this company becomes “conscious of a social warmth from each other’s presence and contiguity” (118), an “aesthetic company” that is ideal and embodied, proximate and fantastic.
The intimacy of these artists, importantly, does not rely on sameness of outlook, longevity of commitment, or reciprocal knowledge. Not bound even by “any large stock of mutual affection,” this group partakes of “jealousies and petty animosities” (118) as much as anything. Such differences and contestations are essential to aesthetic intimacy. What Hawthorne says of aesthetically inviting artworks—that their charm “lay partly in their very imperfection; for this is suggestive, and sets the imagination at work; whereas, the finished picture, if a good one, leaves the spectator nothing to do, and, if bad, confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him” (123)—is equally true of intimacies, which rest as much on fantasy as on realism, on obscurity as on revelation. The autonomous alterity of “others” may be, finally, their keenest appeal.
In these terms, the ideal artist and friend in the romance is neither Hilda nor Miriam but the sculptor Kenyon, who articulates principles of aesthetic intimacy closest to Schiller’s. Kenyon first discovers his aesthetics, appropriately, when he attempts to sculpt his friend, Donatello, but encounters frustrating difficulty, not in “hitting the likeness,” but in making “this genial and kindly type of countenance the index of the mind within” (244). “So evanescent a show of character” demands that Kenyon reach “beyond his consciousness” (245). Kenyon must move beyond Hilda’s faith in form and Miriam’s reliance on consciousness to something more interactive, the play of subjectivity and materiality that generates the middle ground of aesthetic imagination. “There is a singular effect, oftentimes,” Hawthorne writes of Kenyon’s aesthetic process, “when out of the midst of engrossing thought and deep absorption, we suddenly look up and catch a glimpse of external objects. We seem, at such moments, to look farther and deeper into them, than by any premeditated observation; it is as if they met our eyes alive; and with all their hidden meaning on the surface, but grew again inanimate and inscrutable the instant that they became aware of our glances” (293). Meaning shifts, in Kenyon’s aesthetic, from the object’s surface to the viewer’s imagination (“There is always the necessity of helping out the painter’s art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination,” Hawthorne writes, to the extent that “you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating” [303]), without surrendering the power of the object to transform the viewer by inviting a more fantastic ordering of experience. This process, in which the object becomes more fantastic than its material form, yet retains a transformative solidity that forbids full possession and transforms the viewer’s consciousness, becomes most strikingly evident when Kenyon stumbles upon a half-buried statue. The “magical” (381) effect of the discovery diverts Kenyon from his obsessive search for the vanished Hilda without enabling the cathexis of possessive desire onto the statue’s always half-obscured female figure.
Consciousness without full comprehension, revelation that turns out to be (partial) projection, the mixture of materiality and invention: these are the elements of romantic aesthetics that also enable a nonpossessive, nonjudgmental, and mutually transformative intimacy. Just as Kenyon’s aesthetics combine Hilda’s formalism with Miriam’s hypersubjectivity, so his ethics combines Hilda’s rigid categories of right and wrong with Miriam’s mitigating emotionalism. He tells Hilda, “‘you do not know (for you could never learn it from your own heart, which is all purity and rectitude) what a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest criminal, if you look at his conduct from his own point of view, or from any side-point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty’” (346). Translating objective moral categories into negotiated social contracts, he warns Hilda, “‘when a human being has chosen a friend out of all the world, it is only some faithlessness between themselves, rendering true intercourse impossible, that can justify either friend in severing the bond’” (187). Hilda seems to learn this lesson, albeit too late, musing, “‘Methinks, it is this that makes the Catholics so delight in the worship of saints; they can bring up all the little worldly wants and whims, the individualities and human weaknesses, not as things to be repented of, but to be humoured by the canonized humanity to which they pray’” (413).
Kenyon’s lesson is ultimately aimed not at Hilda, but at the reader of The Marble Faun, however, as Hawthorne makes clear in his famously vexing postscript to the narrative, which seems to affirm his sculptor’s views on both aesthetics and intimacy. Reporting his readers’ dissatisfaction with the narrative holes left in The Marble Faun by its cryptic conclusion, Hawthorne confesses of the third-person narrator: “he was himself troubled with a curiosity similar to that which he has just deprecated on the part of his readers, and once took occasion to cross-examine his friends, Hilda and the sculptor, and to pry into several dark recesses of the story, with which they had heretofore imperfectly acquainted him” (418). His “friends,” however, provide all the clarity “of a London fog,” and Hawthorne is just as glad, for clarification is the death of imaginative intimacy, as he suggests by invoking, once again, his ideal reader, who “would not thank us for one of those minute elucidations, which are so tedious, and, after all, so unsatisfactory in clearing up the romantic mysteries of a story” (410). The “sagacity, by which he is distinguished,” Hawthorne continues, “will long ago have taught him that any narrative of human action and adventure—whether we call it history or romance—is certain to be a fragile handiwork, more easily rent than mended. The actual experience of even the most ordinary life is full of events that never explain themselves, either as regards their origin or their tendency” (410). Such a gap invites collaborative invention, friendship’s mutually transformative interpretations, the experiential truth of “actual experience.” As Hilda learns too late, nobody “‘ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness’” (342).
What’s true of art is truer of intimacy. While Miriam and Hilda are torn apart by their inability to transform through mutual exchange, the friendship between Donatello and Kenyon changes both men, aesthetically and morally. By the novel’s end, Donatello has become “seasoned” by sin and Kenyon has come to see the need for optimism (his final call to Hilda to guide him home). Again, same-sex intimacy—and the resemblance of the two men to Hawthorne and Melville is suggestive—leads from extreme self-containment or world-weariness to a middling position that allows for imagination (Donatello refuses to supply the “truth” of his mythic background among the fauns, while Kenyon, in the final “interview” with the author, helps him to keep things foggy). Intimacy is powerful because it is suggestive, gap ridden, incomplete. It is powerful because it makes beauty both interpretive and material (a collage-work of intimacy). It flourishes on the mysterious, the marvelous, the mythical—Schiller’s ideal aesthetic realm was, not surprisingly, Greece—in defiance of the pedantic plausibilities of the actual.
The relationship of imaginative aesthetics to visionary intimacy was brought home to Hawthorne by his Gentle Reader, who was also, happily, an Exuberant Writer. In June 1851 Melville wrote to Hawthorne from nearby Pittsfield, “I am told, my fellow-man, that there is an aristocracy of the brain. Some men have boldly advocated and asserted it. Schiller seems to have done so, though I don’t know much about him.” Melville knew enough to suggest that Schiller might help generate “ruthless democracy,” in which movement beyond the plausible, the conventional, and the actual is possible.12
Postscript: The Return of the Marble Faun
Over a hundred years after Hawthorne published his romance, the Marble Faun returned, this time in the modern-day centers of the counteractual, Hollywood and New York. In 1975 Albert and David Maysles released Grey Gardens, soon to become a cult classic. The documentary film examines the lives of Big Edith and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who lived in a dilapidated East Hampton manion. The documentary—and the 2006 musical adapted from it—depicts a surprisingly Hawthornesque intimate aesthetic. Although the two inhabitants of Grey Gardens bear a surface similarity—of musical ambition, of paternal disapproval, of domestic eccentricity, even of name—each maintains a fantasy life that allows her, despite constant and lifelong proximity, to assert periodic autonomy. As Little Edie’s eccentric outfits comprising incongruous household items demonstrate, moreover, their intimate combinations of familiarity and strangeness draw from an aesthetic combination of materiality and fantasy that produces aesthetic responses no less startling than those produced by the two women’s relationship. Grey Gardens, in other words, is, in relation to its suprising intimations, a remarkably queer place of nearly impossible to define intimacies, of fantastic aesthetic creation, and of resistant counterculturalism (as Edie sings in the musical, East Hampton “is a mean, nasty Republican town!”).
Its queerness became even more evident when the Marble Faun made one last appearance, this time in a taxi cab in Queens, New York.13 When a cabbie asked a young filmmaker in his cab if she knew Grey Gardens, which she did, he informed her, “I’m the Marble Faun.” A teenage runaway, Jerry Torre entered Grey Gardens one afternoon when, in response to his knock at the door, Little Edie answered and exclaimed, “Oh my God—the Marble Faun has arrived!” Torre became the Beales’s caretaker, developing a particularly affectionate relationship with Big Edith (captured in the musical by the number “Jerry Likes My Corn”). Appreciating the mixure of the real and the fantastic Hawthorne placed at the heart of romance, as well as of the generously social intimations it enables, Torre claimed that the Beales “showed me a life where you could be yourself, explore, take chances.” When not engaged repairing Grey Gardens or helping Big Edith mix cocktails, Torre was a regular at Manhattan’s gay bars, especially the Anvil, where he danced on the bar in a jockstrap and where he escorted cousin Jackie when she asked him to take her clubbing. In 1977 he was voted Mr. Club Baths. After Big Edith died and Little Edie decamped from Grey Gardens to start a brief career as a cabaret performer and fashion designer, Torre, appropriately enough, opened an East Village art-moving company and, in a wonderful twist of fate, took up sculpting. Asked in 2006 about his plans for the future, he claimed, “I want to attend The Arts Students League, here in NY, to be taught the ins and outs of stone-carving.” He bought a copy of The Marble Faun on Amazon.com but claimed never to have read it. If he had, he might have been startled by his own transformation from sculpture to artist and how closely the unpredictable and fantastic intimacy he created with the Beales reproduces Wildean aesthetic sociality. The cult following of both the documentary and musical suggests a continuing hunger for an aesthetics beyond the actual, which, as Hawthorne, Wilde, and the inmates of Grey Gardens all understood, romanticism is uniquely able to provide.
Notes
1. In “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” Russ Castronovo and I discuss the convention of opposing aesthetics and social criticism. That tradition stems from Marx’s claim in The Eighteenth Brumaire that performativity and poetics are counterrevolutionary to Roland Barthes’s claim that “Revolution excludes myth” to Terry Eagleton’s sustained analysis of how the major chords of aesthetic theory give voice to bourgeois ideology to Fredric Jameson’s declaration that what looks like political engagement in aesthetics is only an “epistemological repression” that prevents sociality from coming into focus. Christopher Castiglia and Russ Castronovo, “A ‘Hive of Subtlety’: Aesthetics and the End(s) of Cultural Studies,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (September 2004): 423–35. See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 146; Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); and Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s “Specters of Marx,” ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993), 52–53.
2. Judith Butler, “The Force of Fantasy: Mapplethorpe, Feminism, and Discursive Excess,” The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 183–203. The “real,” for Butler, is “a set of exclusionary and constitutive principles which confer on a given indication the force of an ontological indicator” (186). For Butler, fantasy need not be “equated with what is not real, but rather with what is not yet real” or “what belongs to a different version of the real” (185). For a fuller discussion of the implications of Butler’s argument for Romantic aesthetics, see my Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008), 213–15.
3. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Intentions (London: Methuen, 1927), 4. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
4. Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others (New York: New Press, 1997), 136, 138.
5. For a fuller discussion of the relationship of queer intimacy to institutional intimacy, see my “Alienated Affections: Hawthorne and Melville’s Trans-Intimate Relationship,” in Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person, eds., Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 321–44.
6. Henry James, Hawthorne (New York: Cornell University Press, 1956), 105. Further page references will appear parenthetically in the body of the essay.
7. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of Monte Beni (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 215. Further page references will appear parenthetically in the text. Hawthorne imagined that in Italy the world “had been set afloat, as it were, for a moment,” relieving his characters “of all customary responsibilities for what they thought and said” (12). For Hawthorne, Italy was a “floating world,” bringing forth what is most speculatively nonconforming in “the texture of all our lives” (4). Hawthorne draws on similar language to describe Italy as Wilde used to describe that other “floating world,” Japan, which, according to Wilde, “was a pure invention” of and for Wilde’s British readers.
8. Quoted in Sidney P. Moss, “Hawthorne and Melville: An Inquiry Into Their Art and the Mystery of Their Friendship,” in James C. Wilson, ed., The Hawthorne and Melville Friendship: An Annotated Bibliography, Biographical and Critical Essays, and Correspondence Between the Two (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991), 179. Further page references to exchanges between Hawthorne and Melville will be given parenthetically in the text and will refer to this collection.
9. Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
10. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design (Whitefish, MO: Kessinger, 2003).
11. Friedrich Schiller, “Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays, ed. Nathan Haskell Dole (Boston: Wyman-Fogg, 1902), 1–16. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.
12. Wilson, The Hawthorne and Melville Friendship, 234.
13. The facts of Jerry Torre’s “return” and of his life at Grey Gardens come from Adam Green, “The Marble Faun,” New Yorker, March 6, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/03/06/060306ta_talk_green (accessed April 9, 2011).