Reinventing the Peabody Sisters

Watery Angels: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s Artistic Argument in Notes in England and Italy

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s journal entry for 12 January 1862 reads, “I copied Raphael’s angel all day” (Woodson, Rubino, and Kayes 287). Two years after her return from Italy, she still made time for art amidst domestic routines, and spirituality continued to figure as a significant component of that art. The influence of Italy stayed with her: on March 22 she “read Arnold’s Rome,” on December 15 she “read Ellery’s Rome,” and on a June 11 visit to Dorchester, she “talked Rome all the evening” (Woodson, Rubino, and Kayes 295, 304, 322). Similarly she maintained the efforts— “All day I drew on the Angel for Una”—that would extend the power of the great works she had seen and add her artistic hand to the continuum (Woodson, Rubino, and Kayes 293). Yet despite the centrality of art in her life, with only a few notable exceptions, our contemporary understanding of Sophia Hawthorne has been informed by criticism that seldom considers her creative work as a painter and a writer. Critical attention has focused almost exclusively on Hawthorne’s influence , both direct and indirect, on the writings of her husband, Nathaniel. Claire Badaracco, for example, asserts that Sophia is “best known in this [the twentieth] century for the omissions in her 1868 edition of Hawthorne ’s Notebooks, and as the model for Hilda in The Marble Faun” (92).1 Although remembered as the copyist who transcribed her husband’s notebooks , Hawthorne consistently made time for her own text even as she negotiated a hectic editing schedule. Thomas Woodson notes that “Mrs. Hawthorne’s journal for 1869 reveals that she completed copying Hawthorne ’s English notebooks in June, and that she spent a month . . . making Watery Angels Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s Artistic Argument in Notes in England and Italy annamaria formichella elsden • 129 • 130 • perspectives from abroad her own Italian journal ready for Putnam. . . . After reading proof of her own book in October, she recorded on November 1: ‘I began to copy my husband’s Continental journals’” (Notebooks, 922). The journal suggests Hawthorne’s chaotic work schedule as she remained dedicated to her own book. Emphasis on Hawthorne as either an editor or a catalyst for another’s creative work overlooks her career as an artist and continues a legacy of silencing begun during her marriage. Well-known for his protest against what he called a “d—d mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel refused to allow his wife to publish her written work.Apparently,though,he recognized her talents. Edwin Miller writes, “Although Hawthorne acknowledged the superiority of Sophia’s accounts of England and Italy to his own,he did not want her to become a female scribbler: he preferred silent women and no competition” (202). Despite Nathaniel’s proscriptions, Sophia Hawthorne stepped out into the public gaze five years after his death, in 1869, with the publication of Notes in England and Italy, acknowledging in her preface “the pain it has cost me to appear before the public.” Her rhetoric suggests not only the discomforting self-disclosure involved in the act of publication but also, and more importantly for my argument, Hawthorne’s intimate connection to her written work. Gloria Erlich indicates some of Hawthorne ’s conflicted feelings about publishing: “Although [Sophia] was a capable writer as well as artist, she accepted during [Nathaniel’s] lifetime his prohibition against publication by females. Only after his death and pressed by financial need did she publish some of her travel notes” (101). This chapter argues that more was at stake for Hawthorne than monetary gain.2 Crossing various borders that constrained nineteenth-century American women artists, Notes in England and Italy articulates a creative agenda that Hawthorne nourished privately for years and ultimately sought to display. In her narrative,Hawthorne argues for the profound communicative potential of visual art and insists that, by returning to honesty of intention and expression, artists can and must redeem a historical context that lacks spirituality . Another crucial concern in Hawthorne’s aesthetics is gender, as her text emphasizes women’s role in the creative process. Interestingly, two American sculptors working in Rome during the same time period— Harriet Hosmer and Edmonia Lewis—seemed to share Hawthorne’s ideals: annamaria formichella elsden • 131 to demonstrate the potential of strong women to work as artists and to serve as the subject matter for great art. Hosmer’s and Lewis’s...