Machines for the Suppression of Time: Statues in Suor Angelica, The Winter's Tale, and Alcestis

1 COMPAEATIVE i ama Volume 24Spring 1990Number 1 Machines for the Suppression of Time: Statues in Suor Angelica, The Winter's Tale, and Alcestis Robert C. Ketterer This essay examines the dramatic presentation of three stories based on a pattern of error, repentance, death, and resurrection: Puccini's one-act opera Suor Angelica, Shakespeare's The Winter 's Tale, and Euripides' Alcestis. More specifically, it examines how those dramas employ the motif of the statue-come-to-life which drives their final scenes. In The Winter's Tale, the supposedly dead woman is returned to her husband by pretending to be a statue that is magically animated. In Alcestis, a promise to make a statue is called to mind as Alcestis returns from the grave to Admetus. At the end of Suor Angelica the Virgin Mary appears in a miracle—the libretto does not call for an animated statue of the Virgin, but that is one way the miracle has been staged—taking an idea from popular religion and thus connecting the miracle with an established stage object.1 I will be maintaining the aptness of that method of production for Suor Angelica, both historically and thematically, and then use ROBERT C. KETTERER is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa. He has published articles on Aristophanes and Plautus, and has co-edited a facsimile edition of Thomas Legge's Solymitana Clades in the series Renaissance Latin Drama in England. 4 Comparative Drama the discussion of the opera as a basis for analysis of the other two plays. The intent is not to demonstrate a historical connection between these dramas (though one may exist between Shakespeare and Euripides2), but rather to use the common motif as a way for the plays to comment on one another. The idea of an animated statue that precipitates a crisis or effects a resolution is already present in two stories from antiquity which may serve initially as paradigms for discussion of the statue motif. One is of course the story of Pygmalion, the artist who hated real women and so created his own ideal woman from marble. Conceiving a passion for his creation, Pygmalion prays to Venus that it might become real; his devotion is rewarded, and the statue comes to life to requite his passion and become his wife (Ovid, Metamorphoses X. 243ff). The second story is that of Protesilaus and Laodamia, told in various ways by the Latin elegists and recounted in full by Euripides in a play entitled Protesilaus, the content of which is known now only from fragments and summaries.3 According to that myth, Protesilaus was the first warrior killed at Troy. His wife Laodamia was so distraught that she made a wax statue as a substitute for her husband and hence created, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has suggested, a connection with the soul of the departed through a kind of sympathetic magic.4 The gods took pity on Laodamia's devotion and allowed Protesilaus a brief return from the dead to speak with her. These two statues, therefore, function differently: Pygmalion's is an independent creation of an idealized being that becomes real; Laodamia's is a substitute, an attempt at re-creation of something that has been lost. As we will see, the statues in the three dramas have the characteristics of both these prototypes. Furthermore, a passage by Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests a means of analyzing the statue types as they appear in their dramatic contexts. In the introductory chapter to The Raw and the Cooked, Lévi-Strauss compares myth and music, and says: "It is as if music and mythology only needed time to contradict it. Both are, in effect, machines for the suppression of time [L'une et l'autre sont, en effet, des machines à supprimer le temps]. . . . Because of the internal organization of the musical work, the act of listening to it has immobilized the time which passes; ... it catches it up and folds it back: it is as if in listening to music, and while we listen to it, we rise to a sort of immortality." The beginning of the work of music or of a Robert C...