SOURCE: Knapp, Bettina L. “But It Is Impossible in Such Hurried Visits to Immortal Works, to Give an Adequate Idea of Their Character.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 22, no. 1-2 (March 2002): 47-58.

[In the following essay, Knapp explores Hawthorne's responses to Italian Renaissance art as contained in the “Roman Journal” portion of her Notes in England and Italy.]

“Character,” upon which Sophia Hawthorne's art appraisals focused, spawned many of the critical responses … imprinted in her “Roman Journal” (1858). Not only did her probings reveal an ingrained sense of esthetics, a historical understanding of the artists and the periods treated; but most intriguing were her glimpses into her inner topography: her idealizations, happy, and somber mood swings. Understandably, then, did her verbal distillations range from rationally and meticulously controlled to flamboyant, lyrical, and excitable assessments. Her melding of ethics paved the way for ideological strayings which, on occasion, took her far afield from the constricting guidelines of her time. Such flights encouraged her to see into line, form, and rhythmic sequences, transforming her “Roman Journal” into a living document of the soul.

Sophia's art critiques disclosed a uniquely personal feel for figures and objects, which not only expanded the scope of her original intent, but endowed the segments of the canvas that caught her eye with life and breath. It may be averred that when deeply moved by a visual image, she became possessed by it, unleashing a flow of insights which struck deep into the heart of the artist's creative impulses—and by extension her own spirited energies.

Immensely qualified to pursue a vocation of art criticism, Sophia who had been drawing and painting since the age of eleven, accomplished her undertaking with exacitude and dexterity. Indeed, Thomas Doughty and Washington Allston had been so impressed with the copies she had made of their canvases, that the latter artist suggested she go to Europe and “devote herself to art” (J. Hawthorne, 1968. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife. I, 64ff.).

Significant as well was the joy she seemed to have in the composition of the “Roman Journal.” Orchestrated within these pages were her finely trained pictorial talents, her complex, and at times confidential ideological notions, and, yes, her bodily reactions to the sensory experience aroused in her by the art object per se. “How I like to write down the illustrious names of what I have all my life long so much desired to see! I cluster them together like jewels, and exult over them” (S. Hawthorne, 1869, Notes in England and Italy, 98)¹. Indeed, the power of Sophia's projections onto an image may even have helped her come to terms with certain latent, but troubling feelings that the work had constellated in her psyche.

CHARACTER AND THE ARCHETYPAL IMAGE

The word character derives from the Greek—charakter, to engrave, indicating a distinctive sign. Sophia's art appreciations encompassed not only the beauty, ugliness, and drama she saw in the linear forms before her, but the behavioral patterns locked into the artists' designs and tonalities as well. In this regard, her typological assessments may be identified with C. G. Jung's archetypes (from the Greek, archi, beginning, and typos, stamp, or original form in a series of variations). Archetypal or primordial images, which emerge from the profoundest layers of the unconscious, are contained in the “suprapersonal and non-individual” collective unconscious. Although “inaccessible to conscious awareness,” the contents of the collective unconscious are the archetypes and their specific symbolic representations, archtypal images” (E. Edinger, Melville's Moby-Dick, 147). Archetypes are experienced in universal motifs, such as the Great Mother, the Spiritual Father, and so forth.

To be noted in our discussion of Sophia's “Roman Journal” are her annotations and frequent emphases on archetypal images revolving around the anguish of martyrdom, and various types of mother, father, and maiden/parthenos figures. In many cases, her reactions seem to strike a powerful note with her, disclosing certain magnetic fields and/or energy centers in her psyche, which in turn cause her to project more intensely onto the images under scrutiny. The increase in fascination or revulsion garnered from the picture(s) under scrutiny, serve to heighten her pulsations, which she then decants in her verbalizations. For example, her depictions of Cesare Borgia or Beatrice Cenci, are notable not only for the vigor of Sophia's shifting emotions, but for their catalytic impact on an ensuing inner transformatory process: change from an abstract unconscious assessment to an electrically charged conscious appraisal injected into the written word. In that the impact of this type of rite of passage, may be compared to the “eruption of an inner, but active volcano,” its aftermath could be destabilizing (J.Jacobi 1957, Complex, Archetype, Symbol, 48).

The word projection, as used above, implies an act of thrusting forward “a process whereby an unconscious quality or ontent of one's own is perceived and reacted to in an outer object” (E. Edinger, 1987, 147). To project, then, is to attribute characteristics we love or hate onto others, or to ascribe to images and forms those that seem to answer an unknown or unrealized inner need of the observer. While Sophia believed in many instances that the qualities she assigned to an individual, or to a group, in an art work belonged to the beings represented in the painting before her, they frequently were her own. While possibly unaware of their existence in her unconscious, accounting for her inability consciously to understand their reverberations in her life, they nonetheless lodged inchoate in her psyche.

That Sophia projected so freely onto the art works she examined allowed this demure, well educated New England lady to imbue her writings with fervor, passion, poetry, and/or, dislike and contempt. Her impressions, for examples, of Domenichino's canvas, “The Chase of Diana,” featuring this Roman deity and her maidens running through nature's bountiful fields, imbued her writings with a mood redolent with girlish glee, revealing her deep-seated needfulness of abandon, release from concern, constriction, and the coercive guidelines of her existence. Only via the word, catalyzed by form, colorations, and rhythm could Sophia, the voyeuse, feel free to express the hiddenness of her yearnings.

ARCHETYPAL ANGUISH/PAIN

That Sophia should have singled out physical torment in the canvases she described is not surprising, given the emphasis on the subject in Italian religious painting. Her highly empathetic reactions to crucifixions and to various types pf ascetic practices are equally understandable. Having suffered debilitating head pains throughout her childhood and adolescence, and having taken daily doses of “poison” prescribed by doctors to assuage her distress, enabled her to feel into the discomfort of others (Hawthorne, 1968, 63). One might aver that her verbalizations of pain triggered by visual images offered her some form of solace, if only the comfort of knowing that she was not the sole recipient of physical hurt.

Sophia's extended and ingrained experience with corporal torment was lived on both a personal and a religious level, repentance, atonement, and sacrifice living at the heart of Christianity. Understandably did she experience an imitatio Christi of her own, which served not only to trigger her already well formed “religious instinct,” but, in so doing, heightened for her the numinosity of the moment (Jung, C. W. 10, 659).

DOMENICHINO'S “MARTYRDOM OF ST. SEBASTIAN”

Constellated in Sophia's detailed, and ironically, lyrical depiction of Domenichino's (1582-1647) “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,” was the inner resonance the ecstatic experience afforded her. Her projection on to his suffering not only allowed her still living and searing memories of pain to surface, but triggered an increase in her own already deeply compassionate, nonetheless unconscious, attraction for martyrdom as well.

While the eye contact she made with the emotive figure of Domenichino's saint Sebastian elevated her to more spiritual climes, it also succeeded in glorifying, insofar as she was concerned, his suffering through the silent agony of his “divine patience” (204). Unlike other depictions of this type, she indicated that Domenichino

has succeeded in making the triumph over pain complete, and instead of the distressing horror, I felt only a peace which passes all understanding. The longer I looked, the more profoundly I was affected by the sublimity of the sacrifice, for St. Sebastian looks delicately organized, and full of tender susceptibility, as if pain to him were pain indeed, and as if he were conscious, perfectly, of the agony he endured, and should endure. … His gentle might is inflexible, and controls the quivering sensations of anguish into resignation; and his countenance is becoming celestial, as I said as the heavens open upon him, with the sound of trumpets, the golden crown, and above all, the Lord Jesus, not represented bleeding and wounded, and as “a man of sorrows,” but with serene joy beaming like a pearl on his forehead. His aspect says to the sufferer, “Come unto me, my beloved, my brother, and I will give you rest. …

(S. Hawthorne, “Roman Journal,” 206)

Sophia's uncanny insights into Domenichino's forms, tones, and patternings also seemed to have brought into the open certain hidden characteristic traits of her own, namely, those identified with her ascetic Puritanical cultural canon. Her keenly felt understanding of the saint's “sorrow” and “torment” mirrored her own relatively well defined, but unconscious ontological patterns and modes of sensing. Key to her search, she explained, was her desire “to know all about Domenichino, and whether he painted unconsciously in a religious devotion, or whether personal experience of sorrow and torment had revealed so much to him as this” (206). While the answer to such a question was and is elusive, she concluded by shunning the personal, and opting for the collective divine sphere, indicating that

we generally take a masterpiece as if directly from the hand of God, and do not consider the character or idiosyncrasies of the artist. But it seems as if the soul must be pure, and the instrument clean, by means of which the Creator delineates such a scene as is represented here.

(206)

While attempting to conserve and preserve her own emotional anonymity, Sophia nonetheless descended ever more deeply into her subliminal world, confronting in so doing a whole pain-ridden cataclysmic past. Let us recall that Sophia's years of illness, she asserted at the time, had only made her ill-equipped to “fulfil the duties of married life,” but would have “dangerously agitated Madame Hawthorne,” Nathaniel's mother, thus forbidding wedlock. Whereupon, the heroic and self-sacrificing Sophia took it upon herself to stipulate that only if she were cured of her illness would she marry her beloved. “If God intends us to marry. … He will let me be cured; if not, it will be a sign that it is not best” (J. Hawthorne, 199). The likelihood that she would remain an invalid may have precipitated her entry during those difficult years into her own harrowing and psychologically abysmal domain. As sometimes occurs in psychosomatic diseases, “the cure was actually accomplished; and the lovers were justified in believing that Love himself was the physician” (Ibid).

Reminiscent of a hierogram or sacred representation, “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” seemed to have aroused Sophia's long forgotten emotions of awe, fear, terror, divine reverence and beatitude. Yet, and of great interest to the reader of her “Roman Journal” while she would identify with “the sublimity of the sacrifice” as an abstraction, she was unable to accept its brash viscerality in the reality of the blood and gore Dominichino had set onto his canvas. For this reason, perhaps, she was increasingly drawn to the statue of Saint Bruno by Jean Antoine Houdon (1741-1828). Reflecting the ideals of the Enlightenment, he featured his man of religion in a dignified pose, “looking down in reposeful thought, with his hands crossed, and a face of sincere benignity” (207).

RENI'S BEATRICE CENCI

Sophia's visible empathy for Beatrice Cenci, the protagonist of Guido Reni's (1575-1642) tableau, was deeply moving. This masterpiece that hung in the Barberini Palace “baffles words,” our critic indicated. What touched Sophia most deeply were the tragic circumstances surrounding this young girl's fate and the resulting intensity of her suffering (212). That her father, the vice-ridden Francesco Cenci, had imprisoned both his daughter and her stepmother, Lucrezia, in a lonely castle, had encouraged these women to elicit help—to see to his murder—from the former's brothers, and perhaps from her lover as well. Tried and convicted in 1599, the conspirators were put to death.

Rather than focusing on the pathology of Beatrice's eyes, Reni's authentic depiction of “indefinite desolation,” and “unfathomable grief” emerged exclusively from the “perfect beauty of her face, without one line of care, or one shadow of experience—translucent and pure as marble.” Sophia's use of the word “translucent” (L. trans, through, and lucere, shine) and “pure” (L. purus), endowed Beatrice with immaculateness of purpose and deed: thus untouched by any and all pollutants, she was free from sin. Nontheless, that Sophia analogized her with “marble,” a hard, smooth, and cold substance, implied an ambiguity in the young girl's character (213). Could her stone-like impassibility, her extreme control over all facets of her body-mind complex, be looked upon as a saving attribute to an otherwise agonized personality? Might she have been instrumental in her father's murder? Yet have the inner strength to obliterate all visible facial signs of such a deed? “Night is gathering in her eyes, and the perfect face is turning to stone with this weight of voiceless agony” (213).

Sophia's reference to “an expression in her eyes” may have been intended to dramatize the dangers awaiting one so innocent of crime. Or, had Beatrice unconsciously invited her crushing fate? Had her eyes transformed themselves into audible, and forever questioning instruments: “Oh, what is it—what has happened—how am I involved?” (213) Unique among human countenances, Beatrice's had been divested of everything save the “ruin of hope, joy, and life; but there is unconsciousness still, as if she did not comprehend how or why she is crushed and lost” (213). To convey the stifling nature of the young girl's turmoil, Sophia had recourse to the silence of facial pantomime. “The rosebud lips, sweet and tender, are parted slightly, yet with no cry, nor power to utter a word. Long-past words is the misery that has banished smiles forever from the blooming flower of her mouth” (213).

Most admirable, and most tellingly in terms of Sophia's approach to the art object, was her awareness concerning Beatrice's sense of submission to and acknowledgement of her suffering. Her ability to accept her earthly lot had opened up Sophia, as observer, to the young girl's soul power: the breadth and depth of her spirit of atonement, of her brand of moralism—factors uppermost in our New Englander's psychological experience. “The white, smooth brow is a throne of infantine, angelic purity, without a visible cloud or a furrow of pain, yet a wild, endless despair hovers over it. … The delicate, oval cheeks are not flushed not livid, but marble-pale, unaffect by the torrents that have bathed them, as if it were too hard an agony to be softened by tears …” (213).

Although never overt, the impact of Beatrice's emotional lapidation in Reni's portrait was experienced more intensely by Sophia than, for example, Domeninchino's “The Matryrdom of St. Sebastian.” That Sophia had projected onto Beatrice's world of torment had ignited in her a connection between object and subject, enabling her to convey her seering feelings by verbally palpating the young girl's agony. Devoid of murmurs, cries, even whimpers, Sophia greeted Beatrice's walled-in silence as a closure, an inner journey into the very livingness of Reni's canvas. No need of blood and gore to activate an observer's emotions. Reni's miracle resurrected Beatrice's unforgettable countenance via the brush stroke, the interplay of light and shadow, the exquisite immobility of phenomena in the universal significance of its own mutism. Her reverence for Beatrice's agony lived in on its transcendence.

Like Emerson, Sophia trusted her feelings. Like her mentor, she experienced the mind as a creative instrument, responsive to its own cosmogony. As Emerson wrote in his “Over-Soul”: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man in the soul of the whole; the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal One” (R. W. Emerson, 1980,” Norton Anthology. 322).

THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE

Much admired by Sophia was Francesco Francia's (1450-1517) painting of “A Holy Family” hanging in the Barberini Palace.

FRANCIA'S “A HOLY FAMILY”

Francia's early experiences had first been a goldsmith and coin-maker endowed his canvases with a down-to-earth quality with which Sophia undoubtedly identified. Eliciting her most powerful projections were Francia's Madonnas. Unlike those of other artists, namely Raphael, his Madonnas, Sophia indicated, featured older women, still beautiful, but nontheless giving the impression of having lived through years of disquietude and inner conflict. Because Francia's deft palette and linear markings highlighted matronly, rather than simply esthetic facial qualities, they spoke directly to Sophia, and on her terms. Incised in the Madonna's facial contours were life's disheartening and difficult moments. Rather than singling out her exquisiteness alone, he underscored a mother's life experience, her “matronly, pure and intellectual qualities” (209).

A homebody adhering to a daily routine, Sophia tried her best to understand and to deal with the variety of problems arising during a householder's daily trajectory. Equally siqnificant in her purview was the Madonna in her role as archetypal Mother: a divine, eternal, and universal collective figure, who lived as an ideal presence in Sophia's heart. Most impressive in her viewing of Reni's Madonna was her ability to unify dual images: that of personal “Mother, with a perfect sense of all her responsibilities—and the archetypal sacred mother, who “has the Christ for her son” (209).

CORREGGIO'S “NATIVITY”

Mention must be made of Corregio's “Nativity,” displayed at Sant' Andrea. Underscored by Sophia are sequences of patterned luminosities in this canvas: “the light comes from the child, irradiating the Madonna with white effulgence, and dazzling all who stand near” this inviolable image (223). That the Mother is the recipient of cascading lucency, and the child even more dazzling, so serves to set them apart from others, thereby indicating Jesus's godliness and Mary's significance (223).

As a collective and vibrant image embedded in Sophia's unconsious, the Mother figure in Corregio's “Nativity” may have symbolized for her one of countless birthing women endowed with ultimate feelings of inner plenitude. A figure of authority, lest it be forgotten, the Madonna was also the vessel by means of which the “divine child” came into being. As an archetypal infant, common to many cultures—Christ for the Christians, Moses for the Jews, Dionysus-Bacchus for the Greeks, Buddha for Buddhists—the newborn symbolizes futurity for some, innocence for others, and god and/or messiah figure able to redeem humanity's ills. For Sophia, he was looked upon, understandably, as Jesus, the savior!

Deeply moving for this reader are Sophia's allusions throughout her “Roman Journal” to “sacred Madonnas, mothers with tender, anxious care and noble expression, and divine babes and holy saints” (239). Her need for such an understanding, protective, and assuaging maternal presence seems to highlight her yearning for such a presence in her world: the Mother being the one to forever dispense indispensable tenderness and love to her children. As a soul force or anima image, the Mother is the bearer and nourished of life. Identified with Eros, she functions as the relating principle which brings things together in nature and in the human psyche as a spiritually and intellectually unifying force in the mind. She is feminine logos, upon which Sophia relied so deeply throughout her life.

THE FATHER ARCHETYPE

The positive archetypal father, looked upon by Sophia as protector and spiritual director of the family—the usual pater familias—was identified for the most part with the moral precepts of social and religious traditions, that is, courage, loyalty, and the male logos. Nowhere are these characteristics visible in Raphel's (1483-1520) portrait of Cesare Borgia (Borghese Gallery).

RAPHAEL'S CESARE BORGIA

Raphael's canvas “fixed” Sophia's attention for its comingling of “excessive handsome” outer traits, as opposed to incredibly vivious inner characteristics, revealing him as a “monster of humanity” (237). The son of Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia (1476-1507), an unscrupulous warrior and politician, an artful killer of those who threatened his rise to power, was imprisioned in Spain, and finally died fighting for the French king of Navarre who had befriended him. This Man of the Renaissance, looked upon as the living incarnation of Niccolò Machiavalli's Prince, is remembered for his cruelty and his ruthlessness.

For his figure is stately, graceful, and commanding, and his head turns upon his shoulders in a princely way, and his features are high and perfectly chiselled. … But soon one discovers that out of the fine sculpture of form and face looks a cold, dark, cruel, and vindicative soul. The black eyes are especially terrible. They do not send forth any beams, but are introspective, secret and evil. They reminded me of the eyes of the sullen vulture in the Zoological Gardens in London, who sits on his perch, and looks vicious and designing, and above all, cold and indifferent. … The cold lips are closed firmly, with an immutable fixedness of fell purpose. He has ceased to be aware that there is a conscience, and there is no longer any tender sensibility in him to suggest to himself that he is a monster.

(237)

Well aware of humankind's behavioral swings, Sophia sought to, and sucdeeded in, reconciling extremes; the darkness of Borgia's soul in contrasts to the many beatitudinous figures she had noted during the course of her visits to Roman museums. Although taken with the beauty of martyrs, as yielders of compassion and givers of love and comfort, she was accepted as well that other, sinister, side of living beings. The latter, reminiscent of the earliest stage of the alchemists' scientific experiments—the nigredo, or blackening process, is equivalent to the state of chaos, existing prior to the separation of the elements, and in the psychological terminology, prior to the birth of consciousness. Aware of human propensity for intemperate acts, Sophia knew from experience that heights do not exist without depths, nor light without darkness, nor good without evil. Borgia, the supreme arbiter of the nigredo phase, was primal darkness!

The destructive father archetype as detailed in Sophia's vision of this ominous creature was incised in her sharp detailing of such specific features as his eyes, lips, and fixedness of intent. Such emphasis served not only to underscore the portentous dissonances embedded in his personality, but to expose the wiliness of this highly intelligent, but manipulative being, whose inner climate was directed by venal impulses.

Sophia's mention of Borgia's “black eyes” (eyes for the Platonist being the gateway to the soul), which she analogized to those of “the sullen vulture,” endowed our Renaissance man with the attributes of a great bird of prey, while also underscoring his remoteness, unfathomableness, and anthropophagous instincts. His physical, social, and spiritual aberration aroused Sophia's sense of the dramatic, inviting her to highlight his fixed, closed and “curved lips,” which this reader associated with a prison cell into which no one had access. Sophia's verbal canvas revealed a man cut off from his feelings, amoral in every sense of the word, an arch pragmatist whose ends justified his means. “He has ceased to be aware that there is a conscience” (237). Demarcations between good and evil never having been made conscious, encouraged the religiously oriented Sophia to proclaim him an exile from humanity living in a kind of limbo of his own manufacture.

That Borgia was possessed of a “cold, dark, and vindictive soul” encourages a connection with Cronos/Saturn, a Titan who not only castrated his father, but devoured his children for fear of being overthrown by them. So, too, was Borgia a virulent killer. Secluded in his inwardness, as Saturn was in the distant heavens, humans, human and divine acted in parallel fashion when faced with a threat to their power. Indeed, Borgia, Sophia wrote, had “made a pact with the Son of the Morning beautiful once like himself, but fallen, fallen now” (237). With a touch of naiveté, she wondered how Raphael could have borne “to study and dwell upon such a countenance, and then render it so sincerely, as to create another Cesar Borgia, to live during the world's forever?” (238)

THE ARCHETYPAL VIRGIN/PARTHENOS

Sophia's feelings of wishful thinking, particularly those centering on the parthenos—the unmarried maiden—seem implicit in her idealization of Graeco-Roman culture. The freedom, abandon, sense of release, and unmitigated joy elicited in her verbal animation of Domenichino's “The Chase of Diana” evidences her thrilling encounter with this canvas at the Borghese Gallery.

DOMENICHINO'S “THE CHASE OF DIANA”

Sophia's attunement to nature—her probably unfulfilled yearnings to run, hop, gambol, and dance in open meadows in consort with other parthenoi—lend a wistfulness to her depiction of Domenichino's canvas.

Lovely maidens are grouped all about. A wreath of three is rejoicing over the fight of an arrow just sped by one, while a bouquet of two is looking on with animated faces. Diana, in the centre, stands eminent, with arms uplifted over her head, and limbs elastic ans swift for the chase. Two children are lying in the water in the foreground, taking the fresco and the dolce farniente. The picture overflows with bounding, eager, rosy, pure life, splendid as morning; and the children balance the quiet sky, in their pause from play.

(236)

Which were the attributes of Diana that encouraged Sophia to verbally thresh her breathless admiration for this divinity? As an earth archetype, she represented everything that Sophia's outward existence was not. Diana, who quested her prey freely, vigorously and fearlessly in raw nature, had earned the title of “the Wild One.” Unlike the beautiful, determined, but gentle New Englander, the uninhibited huntress and archer coursed over hill and dale, into forested and mountainous lands with her pack of maidens, knowing no stops, no limitations. In contrast were the behavioral patterns of the staid, constricted Sophia, whose morality was both unbending and unyielding. How best could she experience such pleasures? By fantasizing! She virtually transfixed as she gazed at the frolicking and spiraling nymphs joying endlessly in the greenness of the open meadows and undefined spaces before her.

Sophia and Diana were paradoxical figures. As Moon goddess, the latter was identified with the mysteries revolving around the waxing, waning, and disappearing moon, and the punishments or euphoric experiences meted out to those who served her cult. Similarly did Sophia retain her inward secrets, decanting them slowly and thoughtfully at appropriate times, as verbal flickerings in signs, metaphors, anaphoras, alliterations, and tonal dissonances. Her light, born of darkness shone and lived in the strictly deflined contours of her social world, and was experienced for the most part in the luster of her projections, or by lavishing love on those she touched. Unlike Diana parthenos, however, our Roman visitor was neither autonomous, nor independent, nor accountable to herself alone. A helping figure, she was forever ministering to her husband, children, and friends, transposing on Diana's euphoria for life to the authenticity of her acts and values.

VERONESE'S “THE RAPE OF EUROPA”

Pleasure and sensuality were embedded in Sophia's depiction of Paolo Veronese's (1528-88) “The Rape of Europa,” which hung in the Palace of the Conservatori. In sharp contrast to solid/stolid puritanical values, the delight and gusto of her verbal distillations reached incandescent proportions in the array of “stuffs of silk and gold, shining with jewels and brimmed with the rapture that perfect, material well-being gives” (246).

Singing a virtual hymn to the Earth, Sophia was unsparing in her detailed depiction of the painter's finely tuned forms and dynamically graded palette. “It is a glory of earthly felicity, without divine or ethereal in it” (246). She marveled as well at the luxury and splendor of rich womanly beanty in the form and face of Europa. The highlighting of material elements served to enhance the voluptuousness of the soon-to-be-raped young girl (246). Might the excitement of the scene have unconciously entranced this New England mother to the point of eliciting in her a touch of envy? (Europa, so giving in sexual matters, was, nontheless, antipodal to Sophia's sexually repressed environment. Why else would Sophia have been so mesmerized by the enactment of a rape? Why her dithyrambs concerning the bull? “The complete comeliness of the white bull—the large, soft eyes and mild aspect of subdued strength, with the radiant garland of flowers across its brow, are quite in harmony, and the creature seems as high-toned as Europa—nor more nor less” (246).

Nor were sensual/sexual details wanting in Sophia's following three-dimensional verbal orgy:

A little Cupid holds him with a slight wreath, quite securely, and stands with one tiny foot on his leg, as if the bull were a lamb. It is a sumptuous, glowing reality—no dream or vision. There are velvets, brocades, precious stones, and Europa is a queenly woman. The white bull is lying down in the foreground, and Europa sits upon his back, while her maidens finish her toilet … Her eyes and head are raised, and a little thrown back … Over a thicket the head of another bull, or of a cow, is thrust out, the eyes flashing fury and amazement (ox-eyed Juno, perhaps).

(246)

Although rape may be sumptuously and thrillingly evoked by the male painter who increasingly projects on to his increasingly painterly delineations, it is not necessarily so in the empirical world. Could Sophia's sensual commentary of such a crucial event have possibly evoked personal memories of her wedding night? The visceral joy and excitement garnered from the coupling experience she depicted seemed to have invited her, as voyeuse to ponder such an event in retrospect, to relive the thrill of these forbidden joys and bounties of earthly existence. Or was it a momentary lapse on Sophia's part? A desire to rekindle the doctrine of a fourth century Sicilian philosopher, Euhemerus, who believed gods to have once been human beings, thus fostering the ancient belief in the cohabitation between Gods and humans!

Sophia's archetypal Europa, alive as sign and symbol in her psyche, was a living incarnation of the rites and rituals of a whole counterculture for her, one which must have conjured distant and lavish fantasy lands, antipodal to the stark universe of emotional deprivation into which destiny had so precipitiously submerged Sophia

Europa is Venice, as she was in the days of the Doges, when all her palaces were alight with refulgent life and state, and looked like jewels studding the rim of her water-courses, when the air was heavy with fragrant sighs and perfumes, and delicious tones from harp and dulcimer overflowed from gondola and balcony, till the senses could bear no more enjoyment.

(247)

Born of Sophia's secreted personal world, her “Roman Journal” was not simply an intellectual rendition of the multiple art listings she had seen, but an organ, or instrument, of her collective unconscious. Rather than prosaic, it distilled a whole psychic field, born from a remarkable attunement to her cultural canon as well as to the broadening experience of Emersonian transcendental thought. Many of her remarks in her “Roman Journal” may be considered breakthroughs, stepping-stones taking her beyond the traditional and so-called acceptable notions of her day. Is this to say that she felt alienated from her environment? Her emphases, for example, on the sensual side of life, its lavishness, and the joy and abandon of tactile pleasures, might so indicate. By contrast, she may have used these devices as mediating and indefinable powers to help her gain entry into an expanded consciousness that would offer her creative and emotional plenitude.

Sophia's ability to both differentiate and diffuse emotions via linear forms, tonalities, and scenic escapes, only to knit them together moments later in verbally vibrant synthetic mixtures, suggests a unique resulting from her fundamentally open and giving nature. That she allowed her inner voice to flow forth in lyrical, sometimes girlish glee, interspersed with vibratos ushered in by terrifying lower tones, fired and flamed the magic of her verbal artistry, releasing her from what might have been the fate of an emotional shut-in: the aridity and destitution of that very livingness to which she responded so dramatically before the paintings she saw. No, Sophia's world remained rich with warmth and sentience until her end.

As bespeaks her namesake, Sophia, the name given by the Valentinian Gnostics to their intangible Soul, So our New England lady was “a world soul,” born of the original Sophia's “smile” (E. Neumann, 1959, Art of the Creative Unconscious, 56).

Note

1. Sophia Hawthorne, Notes in England and Italy, 308.

Bibliography

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