Nous aurions dû investir Wattpad pour la relecture collective de cet ouvrage !

"Interpretive communities" create truth, right? So it matters who comprises those communities!

They also define the Interpretative Community:

LAST TIME I ended by suggesting that the fact of agreement, rather than being a proof of the stability of objects, is a testimony to the power of an interpretive community to constitute the objects upon which its members (also and simultaneously constituted) can then agree.

from "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?"

Interpretative Community

The story of Miriam/Maria and Antonio’s relation is never fully told by Wilde. The remark here suggests something of the reason why Maria may have taken on the pseudonym of Miriam, who was the elder sister of Moses and who watched as he was discovered and adopted by the Pharaoh’s daughter, intervening so that his nurse would be of Jewish blood. Imagining Antonio as the lost son, we can begin to sense their connection, although this does not suggest why they were exiled from their native Spain or from each other.

This description of Kenyon’s travels resembles, particularly in this phrase, William Morris’ description of Launcelot’s quest to reach Guenevere in Glastonbury in King Arthur’s Tomb (1858). In his ‘Garden of Eros’ of 1881, Wilde paid tribute to Morris as a poet who “with soft and sylvan pipe has oft beguiled / The weary soul of man in troublous need”.

The address here suggests what Wilde has already hinted: that Miriam and Brother Antonio are of Spanish origin, and that they have some significant connection to the Catholic Church.

Kenyon here appeals to the beauty of Tuscany as the healing balm for Hilda’s disdain for Donatello. The idea of natural beauty, and more generally beauty, as a curative for negative experience is a common one.

It is somewhat unusual that Miriam continues to have this stipulation despite knowing that Donatello will be travelling. Chapter 13 is vague about the instructions given by Miriam to Donatello, and about the changes that she makes to the package from the one that Hilda offers her.

Although we are given no surname earlier in the novel, it is safe to assume that this Arthur is the same as the one who formed part of the midnight walking group in Chapter 10.

It is generally thought that the suckling twins beneath the wolf are an addition to the original she-wolf, as they are made in a wholly different style.

Wilde wrote his one-act play Salomé much later, in 1891. The subject began to fascinate Wilde, it seems, after Pater introduced him to Hérodias (one of Flaubert’s Trois Contes) in late 1877. The mention here thus seems to be, by and large, following Hawthorne’s own description of Donatello considering some of Miriam’s sketches, which Wilde had omitted from his Chapter 4 but perhaps did not wish to abandon entirely. It is worth noting that Hawthorne does not name Salomé, but refers to her through her father and the story. Wilde’s reframing of the description shows a sensitivity to the tale that was later to show in his play.

The portrait seems to be in a state of convenient limbo. In Chapter 4, it appeared that Donatello was doing his final sitting, as perhaps intended by Miriam, but the portrait was not quite concluded.

All three of the artists in Wilde’s novel are at the height of their powers, it seems, and this feature is more pronounced than in Hawthorne’s novel. Wilde sharpens the contrast between the three artistic friends, achieving great aesthetic feats, and Donatello and Miriam’s still-nameless model, who both lack such skills or outlet, and so wreak change in the world instead.

The phrase “that was all” is used by Dorian Gray as he attempts to reason with the supernatural nature of his picture. There are many echoes between how Miriam reconciles herself to her past acquaintance’s death and how Dorian behaves. It may be that Wilde had in mind, consciously or unconsciously, some of the phrases and ideas expressed in this work when writing the only novel he published during his lifetime.

Donatello’s crime, such as it may have been, is enlarged here and seems to become fixed in Kenyon’s mind not from his own observation of it, but from the conversation here with Donatello. “I saw but little” becomes a deed that (presumably) both he and Hilda were “forced to witness”.

Donatello seeks here the approval of Kenyon, rather than of Miriam. The knowledge of the murder, if it is such, becomes momentarily a homosocial affair.

The church contains, in the first chapel, Gherado delle Notti’s Christ Mocked alongside the St Michael of Guido, which is not mentioned in the narrative. In the second chapel, which Miriam and Donatello have apparently passed over. is a Transfiguration (Mario Balassi) and a Nativity scene (Lanfranco). It is to Domenichino’s Saint Francis receives stigmata that Donatello turns. There is a certain similarity to the structure of the two paintings, which feature an upright principal figure and a secondary figure in the bottom-right corner, but while St Francis turns his face upwards to the heavens, St Michael’s face is turned downwards at the devil whom he tackles. St Francis, the first to receive the stigmata, died while reciting Psalm 142, which has as its closing lines “In the path where I walk people have hidden a snare for me”. One may speculate about whether Donatello recollects this fact, as the innocent ensnared by people around him is a facet of the Donatello character in both Hawthorne and Wilde’s novels (although Hawthorne makes it more explicit by blaming Miriam’s look for Donatello’s murder of the model). On the other hand, the turn to St Francis may be a commentary by Wilde on Donatello-as-Faun, as St Francis was known for preaching sermons to animals.

Wilde’s insistence on the distinction between fauns and satyrs is evident throughout the novel, and reflects his interest in distinguishing Greek and Roman mythology, as it was in the latter that the satyr and faun became conflated. Broadly, one can distinguish between followers of Dionysus (satyrs) and followers of Pan (fauns). The satyr is primal, lustful, and drunken, and they were often more horse-like than fauns, who were distinctly goat-like in their representations, and who were associated more with the rural wilderness and mountainous regions. The sexual nature of the satyr lends the dark spectre of Wilde’s novel a particularly threatening air.

The word is slightly misused, but is an amusing reference to Wilde’s own circumstances.

Wilde leaves it to the reader to infer from Kenyon’s description, or their prior knowledge, that the Archangel is Michael, setting his foot upon the demon.

Hawthorne waxes about the “delightful” nature of believing in these drawings’ “authenticity”, as such sketches “make the spectator more vividly sensible of a great painter’s power” than the completed work. Wilde attributes less import, as well he might, in the circumstances, to provenance; Donatello’s enjoyment is, instead, purely of the form.

Hilda’s description mirrors that of the man himself in the previous chapter, suggesting her keenness of insight and objectivity, in contrast to Kenyon’s hasty judgment and uncertainty.

Given Wilde’s rapid acquisition of such an accent, we may detect a hint of irony in Kenyon’s remark that such elocution tells little of the person.

The repetition of “freely”, here and in the first paragraph, to describe somatic motion is suggestive of the bodily freedoms that might be derived through art and aestheticism.

Hawthorne’s original makes a passing reference to “persons with overburdened hearts” making confessions to “holes in the earth”, an oblique reference to the fable of the king with a donkey’s ears, whose barber tells the secret to a hole that is later discovered by children. In an Irish variant, the king’s barber tells a tree, which is then chopped down and turned into a harp, which retells the king’s secret in its first melody in front of him. Wilde renders more explicit the danger that Miriam might invite upon herself by warning Donatello of her own unsuitability.

It is not quite clear what Wilde wishes to imply here. It may be a case of labouring the metaphor, or to suggest that Donatello is perhaps not as young as his character implies. There is a greater air of ambiguity about Wilde’s Donatello than Hawthorne’s gently besotted soul.

Palazzo Cenci is only a short distance from Via di Tor Millina, on the other side of Piazza Navona. The Borghese Gardens, however, are much further away, in much the same direction as Kenyon’s studio. The suggestion is that Miriam has been delaying her meeting with Donatello, perhaps for the purposes of avoiding the model who haunts her step.

Beatrice Cenci was a figure of much interest in the mid-nineteenth century. Juliet Margaret Cameron produced a set of photographs, not of Reni’s picture, but of contemporary women portraying Cenci in various poses.

Wilde uses the word in the sense of ‘key-bearer’ here. It is most commonly recognised as part of the title of John Ruskin’s series of letters to working men, Fors Clavigera, in which he provides three definitions, ‘key-bearer’ being the third.

Wilde abandons Hawthorne’s “confraternity”, a religious and gendered term, in favour of an Aesthetic one. Although Hilda remains associated with the Virgin Mary, her religiosity, and in particular her Puritanism, is all but washed away in Wilde’s new version.

Wilde’s directions are more explicit than Hawthorne’s, tracing a course from Kenyon’s apartment near the Piazza del Popolo towards what must be Tor Millina, just west of Piazza Navona.

Wilde chooses to use the Greek name for Neptune, perhaps with his mind still partly full of his short trip to Athens, which preceded his stay in Rome.

In Wilde’s story, Hilda has no actual doves. The naming of Hilda’s home thus seems to suggest an ironic jab at Hawthorne’s original, although Wilde does go on to associate Hilda with doves elsewhere throughout the novel.

Wilde removes all of Kenyon’s doubts about his capacity to understand and sympathise with Miriam, instead figuring this moment of missed understanding—in reality a moment for Wilde to signal a secret—as one of uncertainty in Miriam.

Alma-Tadema was to paint Antony and Cleopatra a few years later, although with little of the attention to authentic Egyptian dress that Kenyon shows here.

Chauncey Bradley Ives had not yet completed ‘Undine Rising from the Waters’, but Strazza’s ‘Veiled Virgin’ was completed at least two decades prior, and may be what Wilde had in mind here, as a Carrara marble sculpture produced in Rome.

Wilde’s flight of fancy links Kenyon to Cheapside in London. In the previous chapter, Kenyon’s home in England was described as strewn with repurposed ruins. This could indicate London, or perhaps that Kenyon was born in one place and grew up in another. York would be an obvious example for the description in Chapter 4.

That Wilde follows “Miriam’s Studio” with “The Sculptor’s Studio” seems to distinguish between the two characters and their creative spaces, but also of course draws them into dialogue, a key feature of his bringing together of Kenyon and Miriam in a way that Hawthorne did not.

Wilde changes Hawthorne’s “wretch” to “shade” here, emphasising the supernatural element of the guide’s story, as well as creating a starker contrast between the supposedly lost fellow and the sunshine that penetrates only the shallowest regions of the catacombs.

Wilde in this chapter bundles up two separate episodes of Hawthorne’s text. As the text proceeds, the direct structural linkages between Wilde’s novel and Hawthorne’s fall away, revealing a pattern entirely of Wilde’s own making. Here, his decision creates a greater link between Kenyon’s attitudes towards Miriam and her model, and the scene in the catacomb, than existed in Hawthorne’s work, strengthening the attachment between Miriam and Kenyon. The change also defers contemplation of Miriam’s “ambiguity” until after the events in the catacomb, increasing our sympathy with her.

There is a certain banal facticity about the changing appearance of painted figures as paints dry, both oil or watercolour. Miriam’s remark, Wilde’s addition, is suggestive of his only other novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the idea seems prioritised by Wilde’s decision to remove the remainder of Miriam’s remarks and attribute them to Hilda, leaving the comment as a conversational road not taken.

There is a Paterian element to this assertion that, although echoing Hawthorne’s Kenyon, is suggestive of Wilde’s emerging theories of aestheticism, and the role of art and spectator.

Wilde changes the addressee here from Hilda to Kenyon, again suggestive of the reorientation of relations to come.

Hawthorne writes “dog”. The change is insignificant and whimsical, but also suggestive of Wilde’s different attitude to his characters.

This additional sentence is the first hint at the different relations that Wilde imagines for the four friends, which become clearer as his version of the novel progresses.

Miriam repeats Kenyon's metaphor of the Faun both unveiled—at the very edge of Nature—and restrained.

The metaphor of sculpture is muddled here. Praxiteles both imprisons and unveils, a combination not present in Hawthorne’s description of Praxiteles’ art.

Wilde here eschews Hawthorne’s apologetics regarding the inadequacy of ekphrasis to capture the “magic peculiarity” of the sculpture. What follows echoes the short commentary of Wilde’s first letter to Tafani.

Hilda echoes here the linkage between thoughts and appearances, of which Wilde was so fond, as mentioned in the notes to his first letter.

Wilde jabs here, we may deduce, at Hawthorne himself, born in Massachusetts, whose novel Wilde interprets as overly certain and lacking in the romance and mystery of the Old World.

Touch, rather than measurement, becomes “absolute” in Wilde’s version. It is the senses, rather than objective facts, that hold the final truth of any artefact.

Wilde again reorders, more than rewrites, Hawthorne’s original. Here, Miriam emphasises Kenyon’s self-image, as well as setting forth a strengthened theory of the mode of sculpture recovering, rather than producing, forms from marble.

Again, Wilde reorders the symbolism of Hawthorne’s rendition; the snake is here prioritised, and the dove of less importance. The insertion of a paragraph break here draws attention to the symbol of the Soul, inviting the reader to dwell on how it might “complete” the moment that the four friends inhabit.

Wilde’s rendition of the original opening paragraph here re-orders the sculptures that are available to the viewer, demoting the Amazon to the end of this list.

Wilde’s preferred title, for a chapter that blends material from Hawthorne’s “Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello” and “The Faun”, helps solidify the affiliation between Donatello and The Faun: both form one of the four friends.

Wilde’s letters but rarely refer to the first-person plural, although he was of course travelling with several companions. That he does so here is suggestive that the visits to sites associated with British literary lions may have been at the prompting of one of his companions.

It is difficult to know quite what to make of this correction by Wilde, or what it signifies regarding their relationship. Their prior correspondence, to which Wilde refers further on, may have shed light on this, but without that additional data, any interpretation would be only speculative.

The introduction of Kenyon into this scene presents Miriam and Kenyon as the worldly figures of Donatello’s initiation into adulthood, changing the dynamic quite significantly.

Wilde omits Hawthorne’s paean to the “feminine task” of needlework and places Miriam instead within the tradition of artists whose concern with their materials extends to all aspects of the artistic production.

Hawthorne presented Miriam’s studio as always in a necessary sort of shadow, “the first requisite towards seeing objects pictorially”. Wilde rejects this description of artistic working conditions in favour of an implicit preference for light except where shadow may produce some particular effect in the expression of a sitter.

Wilde places Kenyon in Donatello’s place here in this visit to Miriam’s studio. The painting of Donatello’s portrait—with Kenyon present—occupies a latter position in the chapter, but the interposition of Kenyon both of the shifting relationships between the characters in Wilde’s novel and of a long-standing fascination for Wilde in the moment of production of art.

In this passage, Wilde removes some of Hawthorne’s more hyperbolic descriptions, such as of an Egyptian sarcophagus holding “the rubbish of the courtyard”. In doing so, he blurs the supposedly generic description of an archetypal Roman palazzo with an actual description of Miriam’s home.

Wilde begins to develop here a different model of relations between Miriam, Hilda and Kenyon. There is something chaismic in the description of the triangular relationships, somehow aligning Miriam and Hilda with “improper Bohemian relations” and Miriam and Kenyon with “fervency of friendship”, when the reverse might be expected. This suggests Wilde thinking through the potential freedoms of creative relationships, and may be seen as prefiguring some of his interest in women’s position in aesthetic circles, such as expressed through his work on The Lady.

It is odd that the almost perfect triangulation that Wilde describes in the previous sentence, holding the various friendships in a sort of necessary suspension, must immediately be supplemented by the addition of another.