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In Chapter Seven of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), the narrator describes in exquisite detail a reproduction of Guido's Beatrice Cenci rendered by Hilda, a young American copyist:
The picture represented simply a female head; a very youthful, girlish, perfectly beautiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich though hidden luxuriance of auburn hair. The eyes were large and brown, and met those of the spectator, but evidently with a strange, ineffectual effort to escape....It was the very saddest picture ever painted or conceived ; it involved an unfathomable depth of sorrow,....It was a sorrow that removed this beautiful girl out of humanity, and set her in a far-off region, the remoteness of which--while yet her face is so close before us--makes us shiver as at a specter. (53)
Hilda's friend Miriam views the picture with admiration, upon which the two women debate the nature and extent of the legendary Beatrice Cenci's guilt. They cannot come to a consensus; Hilda proclaims Beatrice's act an "inexpiable crime," while Miriam suggests that it was perhaps "no sin at all, but the best possible virtue in the circumstances" (55). For critic Natalie Michta, this very ambiguity surrounding Beatrice--a paradoxical combination of both guilt and innocence--serves as commentary upon the moral natures of both Hilda and Miriam. Beatrice, Michta argues, embodies at once the innocence of the saintly Hilda and the "tainted," fallen nature of Miriam (255). This reading, however, seems too simplistic in its polarized designation of Miriam as a fallen woman in contrast to the angelic Hilda. Rather, I would argue that the text's invocation of Beatrice Cenci--as a multifaceted, divided subject--pertains primarily to Miriam, and ultimately serves to portray Miriam more as heroic avenger than as guilt-ridden culprit.
In light of numerous parallels between Hawthorne's Miriam and Shelley's Beatrice, we cannot but assume that Hawthorne derived direct inspiration for his character from Shelley's portrayal of Beatrice in The Cenci. Miriam, like Beatrice Cenci, is terrorized--in a psychological and possibly even a sexual sense--by an older male figure. Although this man, referred to as "the artist's model," is never explicitly identified in the text, many critics describe him as Miriam's father (Michta 252). Just as Beatrice Cenci authorizes her father's murder, Miriam assumes complicity in the violent death of the model. Although Michta draws a number of comparisons between the circumstances and actions of Beatrice Cenci and Miriam, this essay seeks to define a far more complex and interesting relationship between the two. Both these women perform murderous acts, and thus would be deemed "unnatural" and perhaps even monstrous by nineteenth-century readers. The textual representation of both these women, however, tends to undermine any imputation of their guilt. Beatrice and Miriam, although violent, are portrayed as vehicles of divine power and justice, figures above the laws of society and reason itself. Their "divine" figuration takes them, at times, "out of the sphere of humanity itself" (to quote Hawthorne's narrator)" so that these women even appear as deities themselves, less the vehicles than the originators of divine violence.
I describe Beatrice and Miriam's acts of revenge as "divine violence" because their actions, in significant respects, seem to fit what Walter Bejamin describes as the only legitimate form of violence. In his Critique of Violence, Walter Benjamin identifies an element of illegitimate force in all acts of lawmaking and law enforcement. "Law making is power making," he states, "and, to that extent, an immediate manifestation of violence" (295). Thus the only truly justifiable use of force, argues Benjamin, is divine violence:
If mythical violence [which Benjamin equates with all legalized violence] is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them...if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the later is lethal without spilling blood....God's judgment...strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning, without threat, and does not stop short of annihilation. But in annihilating it also expiates, and a deep connection between the lack of bloodshed and the expiatory character of this violence is unmistakable. (297)
Bejamin goes on to explain that the "expiatory" nature of this violence "purifies the guilty, not of guilt...but of law." In the cases of Beatrice and Miriam, however, their sudden violence does not free their victims (Cenci and the model) from law, but themselves instead. Although elements of the texts portray these women as guilty, polluted by violence, the indirect, bloodless nature of their own "crimes" seems to challenge this judgment. Beatrice and Miriam are not, in fact, guilty, because they have transcended the law.
Another critical paradigm useful for interpreting Beatrice and Miriam as divine characters is that of Elaine Scarry. In The Body in Pain, Scarry describes how in the Old Testament, the dynamic of power between God and the Israelites is sustained by the contrast between God's privileged invisibility and non-embodiment, and the vulnerable physical visibility and sentience of his people. Invisibility implies power; any attempt to represent God--as in the making of graven images--is therefore forbidden. "To see God is to endow him with a body," states Scarry (211). "Visualizing God in material form," she continues, "is described in terms of infidelity, disloyalty, and harlotry....the error of misrepresentation is almost indistinguishable from the error of representation, since any act of representation, any material analogue, is a diminution and distortion of the immaterial" (227). Just as God resists embodiment and representation in Scarry's paradigm, Beatrice and Miriam remain invisible, in a sense, within the texts of each novel. They commit violence against others not with their bodies, moreover, but largely through the ferocious power of their eyes. Theirs are disembodied gazes similar to those described in Foucault's Discipline and Punish; the end result, however, is not discipline but utter destruction.
In Shelley's preface to The Cenci, the author himself views Beatrice's act as indicative of a fallen nature: "Revenge, retaliation and atonement," he states, "are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better" (4). He notes that while "men seek the justification of Beatrice...[they] feel that she has done what needs justification" (4, my italics). Despite this authorial declaration of Beatrice's guilt, it is possible to read Shelley's Beatrice as a wholly just avenger. The textual element which perhaps best supports this reading is the means of Count Cenci's murder. Although Beatrice sanctions Count Cenci's death, she remains distanced from the act, both through her employment of assassins and the count's bloodless demise. Marzio, one of Cenci's murders, states,
We strangled him that there might be no blood; And then we through his heavy corpse in the garden Under the balcony; `twill seem it fell. (IV.iii.45-47)
While Cenci's murder is bloodless, Beatrice also regards it as an action which transcends earthly jurisdiction. She declares that Cenci's murder, by avenging crimes left unpunished by human law, is an agent of divine retribution:
...What! Will human laws, Rather than ye who are their ministers, Bar all access to retribution first, And then, when heaven doth interpose to do What ye neglect, arming familiar things To the redress of an unwonted crime, Make ye the victims who demanded it Culprits? `Tis ye are the culprits? That poor wretch Who stands so pale, and trembling, and amaze, If it be true he murdered Cenci, was A sword in the right hand of justest God. Wherefore should I have wielded it? Unless The crimes which mortal tongue dare never name God therefore scruples to avenge (IV.iv.116-129).
Although Beatrice refers to Cenci's murderer as "a sword in the right hand of justest God," it is Cenci himself, ironically, who most frequently attempts to justify his actions by invoking divine will. In a speech foreshadowing Beatrice's declaration, Cenci declares that his soul is a "scourge" to be resigned "Into the hands of him who wielded it" (IV.i.63-64). His most outrageous assumption of sacred authority occurs at the banquet in Act I, where he points to the sudden deaths of his sons as proof that "Heaven has special care" of him (I.iii.65). Raising a bowl of wine to the sky, Cenci celebrates a profane Mass of thanksgiving, stating that "could I believe that thou [the wine] wert their mingled blood,/Then I would taste thee like a sacrament" (I.iii.81-82). Beatrice, however, directly challenges Cenci's divine authority before all the guests present. Interrupting and disrupting Cenci's "Mass," she commands her father to "Seek out some dark and silent corner, there,/Bow they white head before offended God" (I.iii.156-7).
Throughout most of the play, Beatrice appears to feel that God favors her cause against the tyranny of her father. She proclaims Cenci's death as an act of divine vengeance, and after her arrest states that God "seems, and but seems to have abandoned us" (V.iii.115). When no divine or human force intervenes to rescue Beatrice, however, she experiences a crisis of faith. To Lucretia she says, "You do well telling me to trust in God,/I hope I do trust in him. In whom else/Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold" (V.iv.87-89). If God does not, in fact, act through the evil Count Cenci, or through the corrupt Pope and his emissaries, and leaves Beatrice to her death, then he seems absent from the world of the play. That is, unless Beatrice herself is a locus of divine agency and authority, not acted upon from without, but acting through her own volition. Fittingly, Beatrice's textual representation is, in some respects, similar to Elaine Scarry's description of divine invisibility and power in The Body of Pain. Scarry describes how the Hebrew God's power manifests itself in a sort of one-way gaze; God exercises the privilege of viewing his people while the Israelites cannot--and dare not--look upon his face. Count Cenci describes Beatrice's gaze and countenance as a deadly, powerful thing which has repelled even himself:
...Why, yesternight you dared to look With disobedient insolence upon me.......Then it was I whose inarticulate words Fell from my lips, and who with tottering steps Fled from your presence, as you now from mine. Stay, I command you--from this day and hour Never again, I think, with fearless eye, And brow superior, and unaltered cheek, And that lip made for tenderness or scorn, Shalt thou strike dumb the meanest of mankind! (II.i.106-107, 112-119)
The power of Beatrice's gaze manifests itself again in Act V, Scene ii, when Marzio, after having confessed to the murder of Cenci, "covers his face and shrinks back" before Beatrice (p. 73). During Beatrice's interrogation of Marzio before the judges he cannot look upon her; rather he "bends [h]is gaze on the blind earth" (l. 85) and cries out: "Take me away! Let her not look on me!" (l. 90). He continues, "That stern yet piteous look, those solemn tones,/Wound worse than torture" (110-11). Beatrice's look, finally, quite literally kills her father, for Cenci's murders recall that she instructed them "...with a look/Which told before she spoke it, he must die" (III.i.360-1).
Although I have just presented the text of the Cenci as one which subtly upholds Beatrice's innocence, this text differs from The Marble Faun in that it yet leaves wide berth for the reader to make up his or her own mind in regard to Beatrice's guilt or innocence. The narrator of The Marble Faun, however, while often admiringly sympathetic of Miriam, at once feels obligated to condemn her overtly as a murderess. Critic John Reed, in Victorian Conventions, points out that Hawthorne's Miriam, according to Victorian constructions of gender, suffers from "a crippled femininity." He states that "ultimately, having thus portrayed her womanhood, she [in line with contemporary novelistic conventions] must suffer. The Amazon's weapon maims the maimer" (46).
Despite the "official" judgment of the text, Miriam's representation in Marble Faun again seems to suggest a powerful, divine figure who transcends earthly judgment and legislation. She, like Beatrice, nicely fits into Elaine Scarry's paradigm of divine invisibility. While Beatrice's "invisibility" consists solely in her ability to turn men's gazes away from her, Miriam in Hawthorne's Marble Faun exhibits far more resistance to the gaze of others, seeming to eschew the representative function of the text itself. The text makes much of Miriam's ambiguous, unapproachable status. "She resembled one of those images of light which conjurers evoke and cause to shine before us, in apparent tangibility, only an arm's length beyond our grasp: we make a step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion, but find it still so precisely out of reach" (23). A bit later the text describes her as "plucked up out of a mystery....and all surrounded with misty substance" (25). The source of Miriam's mystery, explains the narrator, is her refusal to divulge her origins, nationality, or family ties. Nonetheless, "it was said...that Miriam was the daughter and heiress of a great Jewish banker" (24); later she reveals that her English mother possessed "a vein...of Jewish blood" (308). Miriam's Semitic origins both reinforce her figuration as an Old Testament heroine and contribute to her ambiguity. Peter McCluskey addresses the motif of Jewish imagery threading the text, including an allegory which Hilda creates about a legendary lost menorah--"The Recovery of the Sacred Candlestick." This and other Jewish references, argues McCluskey, are not only a commentary on Miriam's heritage but also point to the dark void of Israel's history. "Hawthorne continually refers to the history of the Roman Empire and Middle Ages, yet his many glances toward Judaism reveal a history even more illegible than that of Rome....The world of the Old Testament, from the day of creation onward, proves to be history's greatest puzzle" (21). Although the reader can pin down Miriam's origins, to an extent, by identifying her as a Jewess, McCluskey's reading highlights the very instability and unknowability of this origin itself. Miriam has stepped out of an historical abyss, quite literally, to ply her artist's trade in Rome.
The text can provide few details of Miriam's history, nor does it describe her appearance directly. Donatello, Miriam's admirer, comes across her self-portrait in the studio, which the text describes as:
...The portrait of a beautiful woman...so beautiful, that she seemed to get into your consciousness and memory, and could never afterwards be shut out, but haunted your dream, for pleasure or for pain; holding your inner realm as conquered territory, though without deigning to make her home there.She was very youthful, and had what was usually thought of as a Jewish aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither was it pale; dark eyes, into which you might look deeply as your glance would go, and still be conscious of a depth that you had not sounded, though it lay open to the day. She had black abundant hair...if she were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory as crowns no Christian maiden's head.
Gazing at this portrait, you saw what Rachael might have been...or perchance she might ripen to be what Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him for too much adoring it. (43)
This passage does not describe Miriam's person itself, only a representation of her which the artist herself has mediated. It is the only full description of Miriam's appearance in the text. "We forbore to speak descriptively of Miriam's beauty earlier in the narrative," states the narrator, "because we foresaw this occasion to bring it perhaps more forcibly to the reader" (43). As a mediated representation, Miriam controls how the picture portrays her, the text even raises the question as to whether the portrait is a faithful copy. "We know not whether the portrait were a flattered likeness," it states, "Miriam, like all self-painters, may have endowed herself with certain graces which other eyes may not discern" (43). Miriam, then, is hidden behind a portrait of herself, perhaps even a self-willed distortion, to avoid direct representation and embodiment. What Miriam does represent, however, is a beauty like that of Shelley's Beatrice: perilous to look upon, an image which controls and conquers the gazer.
Wandering through Miriam's studio, Donatello comes across more explicit representations of the Biblical Judith, as well as those of Jael. Judith and Jael, significantly, are both Old Testament characters lauded for slaying male enemies of the Israelites. Although the Hebrew Scriptures portray these women as agents of divine power, the text of Marble Faun casts these characters in a less noble light. Miriam uses these Biblical figures in her art to express vindictive rage towards her persecutor:
The first he [Donatello] took up was a very impressive sketch, in which the artist had jotted down her rough ideas for a picture of Jael driving the nail through the temples of Sisera. It was dashed off with remarkable power, and showed a touch or two that were actually lifelike and deathlike, as if Miriam had been standing by when Jael gave the first stroke of her murderous hammer, or as she herself were Jael, and felt irresistibly compelled to make her bloody confession in this guise.Her first conception of the stern Jewess had evidently been that of perfect womanhood, a lovely form, and a high, heroic face of lofty beauty; but, dissatisfied whether with her own work of the terrible story itself, Miriam had added a certain wayward quirk to her pencil, which at once converted the heroine into a vulgar murderess. (39)
Although Miriam's initial conception of Jael leaves open the noble and divine possibilities of such a figure, she obviously decides upon a portrayal of ugly, sordid female retribution. Miriam detests this impulse in herself, seemingly, and so does the narrator. The moral of these pictures, concludes the text, is that "woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life, whatever were the motives that impelled her" (40). Following the descriptions of the Judith and Jael sketches the narrator contrasts these horrific images to what is approvingly described as Miriam's "common and domestic scenes" which are "the productions of a beautiful imagination, dealing with the warm and pure suggestions of a woman's heart"--depictions of mothers, infants, chaste lovers.
Although the text seems to condemn Judith and Jael, as well as female violence in general, Judith and Jael's literary history at once subverts this judgment. Nineteenth-century readers knew their Bible; "any person who could read, whether or not a believer," states George Landow, "was likely to recognize scriptural allusions" (3). Despite the narrator's disapproval of unwomanly aggression, Miriam is here compared to two of the most famous agents of divine violence in literary history. Miriam, however, like Beatrice, seems not so much an agent but the very source of this divine power. She has enormous creative power; more so than her friend Hilda, merely a copyist, or than the sculptor Kenyon, whom Miriam refers to as one among "the greatest plagiarists in the world" (18).
Kenyon, furthermore, has little more success in capturing Miriam's representation than does the text itself. He unveils to Miriam a statue of Cleopatra he has made, "such was the creature's latent energy and fierceness, she might spring upon you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that you were now drawing midway in your throat" (97). Kenyon does not disclose the source of his inspiration, but critics view the statue as a manifestation of Miriam's passionate energy (Michta 225). Kenyon describes his creation of the statue--his attempt to represent Miriam's divine power, however indirectly, as the fashioning of a false idol. "It is the concretion of a good deal of thought, emotion, and told of brain and hand," he states. "But I know not how it came about at last. I kindled a great fire within my mind, and threw in the material--as Aaron threw the gold of the Israelites into the furnace--and in the midmost heat uprose Cleopatra, as you see her" (97).
While Miriam's resistance to representation safeguards her invisibility, the power of her gaze seems every bit as terrifying as that of Beatrice. Miriam continually warns Donatello, her passionate admirer, not to cast eyes on her. "I advise you, at all events," she admonishes, "to look at other faces with those innocent and happy eyes, and never more to gaze on mine!" (44). Donatello persists, however, and witnesses Miriam's transfiguration into a madwoman one evening at the Coliseum. "Unaware of his presence, and fancying herself wholly unseen, the beautiful Miriam began to gesticulate extravagantly, gnashing her teeth, flinging her arms wildly abroad, stamping with her foot" (we recall, at this point, Beatrice's continual allusions to her madness in The Cenci) (119). Horrified, Donatello pleads with her to stop. "How dare you look at me," exclaims Miriam, "men have been struck dead for a less offense!" (119). Twice she warns Donatello to depart, and never look back at her. "Look not behind you!" she exclaims after her bout of insanity, "Get you gone without another word" (119). Lot's wife, we recall, pausing to look back at the scene of divine violence as she fled from Sodom, was transformed into a pillar of salt. Donatello, heedless of Miriam's warnings, himself becomes implicated in her work of violence. One night, as Miriam's tormentor confronts her on the edge of a precipice, Donatello seizes the model and flings him into the abyss below. "I did what ought to be done to a traitor!" he tells Miriam. "I did what your eyes bade me to do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice" (129).
Here again, as in The Cenci, is a swift, bloodless death (via the gaze) reminiscent of Benjamin's notion of divine violence. Nonetheless Miriam, at first, seems unable to decide whether she is in fact guilty. "The shadow [of my past] fell upon me, innocent" she tells Kenyon, but I went astray in it, and wandered...into crime" (308). More emphatically, however, she later repeatedly protests her innocence. "Surely," she tells Donatello, "it is no crime we have committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed to cement two other lives forevermore" (132). Miriam also refuses to acknowledge the civil law's jurisdiction over herself. "I cannot be fairly tried and judged before an earthly tribunal," she states (132); I have assured him [Donatello] that there is no such thing as earthly justice" (310).
Unlike Beatrice, Miriam remains untouched by earthly justice. She and Donatello drop out of the text altogether, presumably to wander the earth in mutual sadness. Prior to her disappearance, Miriam gives only the briefest outline of her history and origins. She reveals to Kenyon her real name, "at which her auditor started and grew pale; for it was one that...had been familiar to the world in connection with a mysterious and terrible event. The reader--if he thinks it worth while to recall some of the strange incidents which have been talked of...will remember Miriam's name" (308). Although the narrator expresses confidence that the reader will uncover Miriam's name, the name remains unsaid. This textual detail seems a final indication of Miriam's divine mystery. In the Old Testament, the name of God, Yahweh, (meaning simply "I am who am") was rarely spoken. "Out of reverence for this name," writes the commentator of the New American Bible, "the term Adonai, `my Lord,' was later used as a substitute.
Beatrice and Miriam are not the only murderous women in nineteenth-century fiction to be portrayed as divine avengers, in contradiction to the agendas of author and text alike. Time and space prevent me, unfortunately, from discussing other "divinely violent" characters such Dickens' Edith Dombey of Dombey and Son. Repeated instances of this sort of divine representation in nineteenth-century literature, however, lead one to ponder its causes. The phenomenon of the divine murderess, I suggest, is a response to the emerging Cult of the Household Angel. When acting as foils to saintly heroines, these women emphasize the binary nature of humankind's conception of the sacred. "All sacred creatures," states Rene Girard, "partake of monstrosity, whether overtly or covertly; this aspect of their nature can be traced to the monstrous double" (251). Miriam and Edith Dombey, as "monstrous doubles" of saintly heroines (Hilda and Florence Dombey, respectively), seem to provide Victorian angelology with the necessary dark underpinnings. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Beatrice, Miriam and Edith are simply far more intriguing than the conventionally bland and insipid heroines of the period. As the divinely demonic figure demonstrates, it is not the gentle goodness of the Christian heroine which makes for compelling reading, but the dark glory of the destroying angel.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985.
Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Marble Faun. 1860. Ed. Murray Krieger. New York: Signet Classics, 1961.
Landow, George. Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
McCluskey, Peter. "The Recovery of the Sacred Candlestick": Jewish Imagery and the Problem of Allegory in The Marble Faun." Publication of the Arkansas Philological Association 18 (Fall 1992): 15-27.
Michta, Natalie Cole. "`Plucked up out of a Mystery': Archetypal Resonance in Hawthorne's Marble Faun." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 31 (1985): 252-259.
The New American Bible. Nashville: Catholic Bible Press, 1987.
Reed, John R. Victorian Conventions. Ohio University Press, 1975.
Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. New York, Phaeton Press, 1977.