Hawthorne's Drowne: Felix Culpa Exculpated

HAWTHORNE'S DROWNE: FELIX CULPA EXCULPATED Michael Wutz Emory University "The Birth-mark," "The Artist of the Beautiful," and "Drowne's Wooden Image" represent the first of Nathaniel Hawthorne's many endeavors to delve into the mysterious catacombs of artistic creation. Published in relatively short succession from March, 1843, to July, 1844, these stories emerge as early auto-referential reflections on Hawthorne's professional vocation, each focusing on the figure of the artist engaged in a specific form of the creative process. At the same time, all three stories seem to take as their point of departure the predicament of Ovid's archetypal artificer Pygmalion and thus reanimate in modulated variations a myth that, in the hands of a less gifted writer, could easily congeal into an empty paradigm devoid of imaginative particularity. This thematic and mythological affinity seems to suggest the common conceptual origin of all three stories in the mind of their artificer.1 And yet, despite this degree of ostensible similarity, Hawthorne carefully accentuates different aspects in each story as if to emphasize both their autonomy as individually crafted artifacts and their radically different intentionalities. For example, while the stories surrounding Aylmer and Owen Warland end with the destruction of their object of experimentation (Georgiana and the mechanical butterfly), the fatality in "Drowne's Wooden Image" resides not in the work of art but in the creativity of the artificer himself, the loss of Drowne's artistic inspiration. More importantly still, especially in light of Drowne's relapse into artistic mediocrity, Hawthorne does not concentrate on the series of setbacks, the importance of artistic vision, and the spiritual growth or stagnation of the artist, as he does in the case of the watchmaker and scientist, respectively. Instead, the story of Drowne the sculptor centers on the "felix culpa," the positive implications of the archetypal fall of man from innocence to experience: Drowne's temporary initiation into the force of Evil, the surge of passion for his Portuguese model, cannot find fulfillment through sexual consummation in his Puritan environment. Therefore, in an act of artistic transformation , he displaces his physical desires through the creation of an inspired objet d'art only to extirpate symbolically his potential for further creative genius. With regard to "Drowne's Wooden Image," first published in July of 1844 in Godey's Lady's Book, critics have not touched upon the sculptor 's fortunate fall. Millicent Bell acknowledges that Hawthorne certainly recognized the possibility of a fortunate fall as opposed to an unfortunate 100Michael Wutz fall in his major works although, she continues, he "may not have seriously tried to choose." Agnes Donohue maintains that only Hawthorne 's sojourn in England and Italy from 1853 through 1860, in the "Old World dispensation of sophistication and insensitivity to moral corruption dissipated his rigorous New England conscience enough so that in his last novel, The Marble Faun ... he permits . . . the possibility of the fortunate fall—good coming from evil." But neither critic is willing to locate such a fall in Hawthorne's early oeuvre.2 Traditionally, the translation of Drowne's inspiration into a unique artifact has been seen as Hawthorne's expression of his fundamentally romantic conception of art. In Bell's terms, the story reveals "how an adept of the Fancy became a genius of the Imagination," a clear echo of Coleridge's famous pronouncements in Book XIII of the Biographia Literaria .3 Such a reading is certainly acceptable. Drowne is introduced as a woodcarver who chisels out his figureheads with mechanical regularity, a regularity that has its correspondence in the mathematical and lifeless precision of his sculptures. They "all had a kind of wooden aspect" devoid of any spiritual essence, thus clearly suggesting the nature of his carvings as products of the Fancy rather than the Imagination.4 Only after he is inspired by love does Drowne's mechanical precision succumb to what his fellow artist Copley describes as "the divine, the life-giving touch" (p. 311), a touch that yields the lifelike figurehead modeled after his Portuguese prototype; and such radical mimetic authenticity could, in Coleridgian terms, certainly be conceived of as a product of the Imagination . Concomitantly, when Drowne begins to...