The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities by Patricia Pulham (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities by Patricia Pulham Laura Eastlake (bio) The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities, by Patricia Pulham; pp. x + 226. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, $110.00, £75.00. "Please do not touch." From ubiquitous signage to spiky plants intended to deter visitors from sitting on historic furniture, the modern museumgoer understands that touching artworks is a forbidden desire in and of itself. Patricia Pulham's latest book, The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities, takes us back to the period when the museum was first becoming an "eyes only space" and explores the cultural associations between statues and sexuality (24). Pulham focuses on transgressive desires, defined broadly as those that would have been "impossible to acknowledge in the moral climate of the nineteenth century … whether these be homosexuality, Pygmalionism, necrophilia or paedophilia" (1–2). Pulham argues convincingly across each of the five chapters that literature functions as an extension of the museum space. The sculptural body in literature is a site where forbidden touch becomes imaginatively possible. Desire is "encrypted" into the language of sculpture both in the sense of its being hidden or buried, but also its being secretly encoded and available for viewing only by those "in the know" (2). We proceed through "a literary gallery of sculptures" beginning with two full chapters on the most famous instance of statue love: the myth of Pygmalion and the perfect woman he sculpts from marble (25). Pulham reminds us that Ovid's account of the Pygmalion myth is just one of a constellation of variant versions from antiquity and that nineteenth-century writers and artists tended to shy away from Ovid's more explicitly eroticized version. Instead, Victorian receptions used the myth of Pygmalion to navigate ideas of pure and impure heterosexual desire, and parallel tensions between the real and the ideal in art. The story of Pygmalion became a touchstone for late Victorian aestheticism and the Parnassian ideal. With the craft of art often expressed by Théophile Gautier and others through the language of hard substances like marble and gems, the desire to touch statues—whether literally as sculptor or figuratively as poet—can be read as part of a larger Parnassian desire to sculpt thoughts in marble. Pygmalion's desire to sculpt the perfect woman becomes a quest for artistic perfection. Pulham offers the works of Arthur O'Shaughnessy and Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved (1897) as examples of a "reverse Pygmalionism which rejects flesh in favour of 'pure' art" but that often renders the living woman a spectral or corpse-like object of artistic desire (74). The remaining chapters look beyond Pygmalion to examine an expanded range of contexts and desires. Chapter 3 explores sculpture and sexuality in the context of Italian collections and the increasing numbers of American visitors to Rome in the second half [End Page 333] of the century. Pulham makes a convincing case that some sculptural works—including the Apollo Belvedere, The Dying Gladiator, various Antinous and Venus statues, and Praxiteles's faun—had become so well known in the emerging mass culture of the day that they could serve as symbols for figuring relationships and desires in fiction for a general audience. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860) is a central case study and an impressive proof of concept for literature as an extension of the museum space and "the interrelationships between aesthetics, sexuality and sensory responses to sculpture" (20). Not only do "Hawthorne's eyes double as tactile fingers that trace the sculpture's line of beauty" and codify homoerotic tensions between the novel's male characters, but due attention is also paid to the characters of Hilda and Miriam and the changing dynamics of their "same-sex sisterhood" through references to a series of sculptural Junos, Venuses, Madonnas, and Cleopatras (116, 125). Harriet Hosmer is naturally an important influence on Hawthorne, both through her sculptural work and her networks of women artists and the romantic friendships or "Boston marriages" that were common in her circle (114). These sections of the book move with impressive interdisciplinary energy, incorporating illustrations alongside letters, diaries, and travel writing. The...