“I feel a giddy sickness of strange awe”: Chillingworth, Cenci, and the Silent Pleasure of Pain

Abstract

Echoing There is good evidence to suggest that Nathaniel Hawthorne deeply admired the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Early in his career, he clearly studied Shelley's writing closely, checking out a volume of his works from the Salem Athenaeum on two separate occasions: first on July 22, 1833, then on June 23, 1835 (Kesselring 47). Later, Hawthorne bestowed high praise on Shelley in his own fiction. In his 1844 tale, "Earth's Holocaust," for example, he writes: "[M]ethought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light than almost any other productions of his day" (10:397). And in "P.'s Correspondence" (1845) Hawthorne articulates the consequence of such "light": an oeuvre whose best work "rest[s] upon the threshold of the heavens" (10:372). Given Hawthorne's high esteem for the British Romantic poet, it is little wonder that he would pay particularly close attention to what Shelleyans have often considered "the most significant serious play of its century written in English" (Curran 33): Shelley's Cenci (1819). Highly controversial in its time, The Cenci stages the crucial events preceding Beatrice Cenci's legendary sixteenth-century death: rape by her father, Francesco; his murder at her instigation; and her subsequent death sentence by a Papal court. In his preface to the work, Shelley dwelled with special emphasis on a portrait he encountered at the Palazzo Colonna in 1818. It portrays a young woman from the waist up, wrapped in turban and white, flowing drapery and bearing an expression that, Shelley said, emanated a blend of "exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow" to produce a countenance "inexpressibly pathetic" (144). Though of uncertain origin and attribution, this portrait was thought, when it attained a nineteenth-century cult status, to be of Beatrice Cenci, painted by the celebrated Guido Reni just prior to Beatrice's execution. Hawthorne, while residing in Rome, was similarly mesmerized. After viewing the painting for himself, he replicated Shelley's praise, calling the portrait "the very saddest picture that was ever painted" (14:92). The portrait's presence in The Marble Faun (1860) is, consequently, keenly felt. For this reason, perhaps, scholars who have analyzed Hawthorne's textual engagement with Shelley have frequently centered their inquiries almost exclusively on how The Cenci resonates through The Marble Faun. Such analysis has often entailed a tracing of explicit textual links, so that features of The Marble Faun become a kind of roman a clef for the Cenci story. Thus, for example, Frederick Crews sees Miriam as a sort of stand-in for Beatrice Cenci, whose history unlocks the closed door of Miriam's unspeakable past (227-28). More recently, critics like Charles Watts have been attentive to the peculiarly refracting quality that Shelley's version of Beatrice Cenci had on both Miriam's and Hilda's interrelated portrayals. Watts suggests a triangulation of Beatrice, Miriam, and Hilda so that both Miriam and Hilda perform versions of Beatrice, even as they become "doubles" of each other, thus "interpenetrating an innocence with an experience of vision" to establish the "basis for the action of Hawthorne's novel" (445). While such a tracing out of correspondences has, to a degree, been illuminating, the methodological approach that seeks textual parallelism as its interpretive end has also tended to suffer from the limitations integral to such a self-contained approach to source study. More interesting, arguably, than a delineation of relatively straightforward correspondences is the discernment of what I will call, following John Sallis, a more diffuse set of "textual echoes": reverberations of "semantic or syntactic elements" that move in less predictable fashion across texts and time to enrich new works in surprising ways (12-13). My interest, however, is less in the "excess of signification" (1) that Sallis notes as he considers the echo's proneness to semantic multiplicity than in Salis's recasting of the Thoreauvian echo. …