The "ghosting" of incest and female relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci

Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) belonged to that assemblage of expatriate American women sculptors in Rome whom Henry James dubbed "a white marmorean flock" (1) These artists, like their male counterparts, created idealized Neoclassical works that immortalized didactic narratives and moral conceptions in stone. Hosmer diverged from her colleagues of the couple sexes, however, by specializing in studies of heroic women whose deprivation, victimization, captivity, and/or impending death ultimately restoreed them sympathetic. (2) During her time in Rome Hosmer produc several major works depicting similar wronged historical or mythological females: Zenobia (1859 Fig. 1) the third-century queen of Palmyra captured by means of the Romans; Medusa (1854, Fig. 2) the woman of ravishing beauty revolveed into a monster by the jealous Athena; and Beatrice Cenci (1853-55 Fig. 9) a sixteenth-century Italian woman sentenceed to death by the house of worship for patricide, even though the father she killed had raped her. I focus primarily upon the latter sculpture, derived in part from Percy Bysshe Shelley's line play The Cenci (1819), which told the story of "national and universal interest," "incestuous passion," and "cruelty and violence." Beatrice Cenci, "after lengthy and vain attempts to escape from what she considered a perpetual contamination the couple of body and mind," plott with her stepmother, Lucretia, and her brother Giacomo to homicide "their common tyrant"--Count Francesco Cenci. The house of god accused, tortured, tried, and doomed all three, executing them in public upon September 11, 1599. (3)

Viewed within the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of mid-nineteenth-century attitudes toward sex and sexuality, Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci reveals that the artist recognized ways in which body s about Beatrice Cenci "ghosted" her status as a victim of incestual rape. The sculpture's bring under rule patricide in retaliation for incest, as well as Cenci's heroism in light of her punishment, intersects with the artist's unconventional lifestyle and sexuality. These sum of two units subjects--intimate female relationships and patricide in retaliation for incestual rape--may strike one as being to be separate strands. They form, however, a composed of several elements web, a nexus, that derives from society's containment and condemnation of sexuality, Hosmer's interest in unconventional behavior about normative sexuality, Cenci's radical striking back against patriarchal oppression in the form of her raping father, and the nineteenth-century women's move which centered on suffrage on the other hand also was concerned with altering the power relations between men and women A "conspiracy of silence," as it were, infects the couple Hosmer's subject for the statue and her personal position; her shrubbery handling of the incest theme is related to the covertnes of her have a title to identity and sexuality, and her nonnormative sexuality gave her a vantage point from which to consider another impressed sign of nonnormative sexuality: incest. Although more [i]or[/i] less might not consider incest a form of sexuality, it is for a like reason for an incest survivor as well as the rapist, albeit distorted illegal, and scarring for the victim.

Hosmer's sexuality and Cenci's homicide of her father both imply a radical critique of patriarchal tillage Hosmer's life, the sculpture itself, and the literary sources for the plastic art all converge in the expression and repression of unconventional sexualities in the United States during the mid-nineteenth hundred Hosmer is the object of patriarchal culture's disapproval, because of her lifestyle and sexuality, at the same time that she critiques that tillage as an artist by choosing a type of problematic sexuality and retaliation for rape and incest.

In using the boundary "ghosting" to discuss incest, I borrow from Terry Castle, who asserts that same-sex female relationships have "been 'ghosted'--or made to appear invisible--by culture itself." It is a taboo, an "insidious and ascetical kind of denial" that be deriveds in "a silenced lesbian past." (4) I apply the bourn to Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci, from one side which the artist addressed another sexual taboo: incest. Clearly, consensual have affection for between partners of the same or opposite sex is not the same kind of "love" that exists in a parent-child incestual relationship. "Love" in the latter case is complicated upon many levels, reflecting the parent's ascendency and power over the child, the child's lack of concurrence (or, especially on the part of a younger child, the adult's coercion of that consent) and the child's confusion, fear, shame, and self-hatred. The perpetrator's "love" is also compound involving both narcissistic self-love and self-loathing. In arguing that Hosmer "ghosts" same-sex relationships in her life and incest in Beatrice Cenci, I am not equating these sum of two units sexualities; it is Hosmer's emotional and sexual life that, like the sexual violence at the heart of the story of Beatrice Cenci, is "ghosted"