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Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Ekphrasis of Hair

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10509585.2013.768178

1740-4657

Leila Walker,

Science Education and Perceptions

Abstract We are accustomed to thinking of works of ekphrasis as using language to prod a visual representation of a static moment into narrative motion. Rightly, then, criticism of ekphrastic poetry tends to focus on visuality and the gaze. But what exactly does it mean for an object to be representational? This article traces the way that not only traditional art objects, but also hair – in locks, on the head, and (occasionally) incorporated into hair jewelry or collages – functioned representationally during the Romantic period. But while an art object typically represents a static moment perceived visually, a moment that can be prompted into narrative motion through ekphrasis, hair, as we will see, typically represents the social existence of a human being made tangible, with complex implications for the continuity of a self that progresses in time as its representation remains changeless. By examining both sight and hair in "On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci" and The Cenci, this article shows how Shelley develops an ekphrastic trajectory that moves not just from sight to speech, but from the politics of witness to the politics of social implication. Acknowledgments Thanks to the anonymous referees at European Romantic Review and to early readers Nancy Yousef, Alan Vardy, Charles Rzepka, and Michael Demson for their extensive feedback, which helped clarify my points. Versions of this article were delivered at the 2011 International Conference on Romanticism in Montreal (as "Shelley's Hairy Revolution") and the New York Romanticists' Friendly Society at the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library (as "Romantic Hair"). My thanks to the generous audiences at both events, as well as to Jonathan Sachs and Michael Eberle-Sinatra, organizers of the 2011 ICR, and Elizabeth C. Denlinger, who invited me to speak at the Pforzheimer, and whose research assistance was invaluable. Notes James A. W. Heffernan provides the classic definition of ekphrasis as "the verbal representation of graphic representation" ("Ekphrasis" 299), yet he also describes this verbal representation as "releas[ing] a narrative impulse which graphic art restricts," "envoicing a silent object" (302), or "turn[ing] graphic or sculptural stasis into process, arrested gesture into movement" (Museum 91); to Mary E. Finn, the ekphrastic poem "animates" "the static object" (177). Hilary Fraser, in her foreword to Illustrations, Optics, and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Visual and Literary Cultures, broadens our understanding of the well-established shift in perception in the nineteenth century to encompass not only new ways of seeing, but also "the equivalently novel conceptualisation of touch in the visual field that might also be said to have begun to emerge in the nineteenth century" (ix). While she does not make explicit reference to hair, its tactility, its propensity toward synesthesia, would surely fall within bounds of her thesis. The fad for a "natural" look was evidenced not only in changing hairstyles, but also in clothes that emphasized the body's natural form. Geoffrey Squire notes that both "feminine" and "masculine" dress "displayed a natural figure for the first time in about four hundred years" (135). Not everyone adhered to Hunt's strict standards: Judith Pascoe notes that in George IV's prodigious collection of women's hair, discovered upon his death in 1830, some locks still had powder and pomatum sticking to them (60). Milton's hair, along with the bulk of Hunt's collection (excluding the strand of Lucretia Borgia's hair), is now housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, TX. Milton might have been a particularly apt choice for Hunt's fixation. Stephen B. Dobranski writes on the symbolism of hair in Milton's Paradise Lost as marking the shift from their prelapsarian to postlapsarian affection: "in the context of the value Milton assigns the couple's locks, the gesture of Adam's dropping the garland also suggests that he and Eve lose the physical and spiritual bond that their hair enacted" before the Fall (350). Erik Gray's recent essay on Keats's poem claims that, for Keats, the lock of Milton's hair represented the "perfect material" to "embody" two time schemes: "the current one, where the past is past and is separated from us by intervening generations; and the ancient one, where the various layers of the past are simultaneously present" (37). Although I will not address Keats's poem here, Gray's essay informs my reading of literary hair generally, and suggests the sense of hair as a figuration for duality – particularly temporal duality – extended well beyond the works of Hunt and Shelley that I address in this article. Heffernan describes the Romantic "belief that visual art has the power to perpetuate a moment, to raise it above time, change, and contingency" as "a child of history. It originates chiefly with the birth of the public museum, which aims at once to preserve the history embedded in works of art and to protect those works from history, from the ravages of time" (Museum 93). That is, the belief in the temporally transcendent power of visual art, and the simultaneous understanding of visual art as constantly at risk of deteriorating into ruin, is a particularly Romantic condition. Hunt's poem applies these concerns, typically associated with visual art, to hair, implicitly including the body part in the field of representational objects. This image, titled The Head of the Medusa and formerly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, is by an Unknown Flemish Master, Ca. 16th century. It is an oil on panel, 49 x 74 cm., in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. It can be seen at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:16th-century_unknown_painters_-_Head_of_Medusa_-_WGA23631.jpg. All lines numbered 41 and on come from the additional sixth stanza, which was first brought to scholarly attention by Neville Rogers. Questions remain about Shelley's intentions for this final stanza, and it is not always included in scholarly editions of the poem, although it is generally accepted as another fragment of the fragmentary poem. There are several variations of the Medusa myth; this version is consistent with retellings from the popular press, 1811–1817. See, for instance, the exclamation "Medusa's head!!!" used in a 13 November 1817 article in The Morning Post, "Napoleon and the Prince of Monaco," to describe the author's surprise at seeing Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815. The "Great Picture" is Théodore Géricault, Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818–1819; oil on canvas, 491 x 716 cm. Louvre Museum. Under Creative Commons License. It can be seen at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Raft_of_the_Medusa.jpg. This painting was on display at the Louvre in 1819 and in the Egyptian Hall of the British Museum in 1820. The Medusa, as used colloquially in 1819, could also symbolize betrayal more generally. A 13 March 1818 article in the "Private Correspondence" section of The Times reported that a man who spoke too vehemently in support of an unpopular amendment was warned, "Take care, Mons. Marshal; you are embarking upon another Medusa, and when you shall have been shipwrecked, your best friends will not be able to save you." Ashley Cross notes the political message conveyed by the Medusa was ambiguous because both radicals and conservatives used the Medusa to symbolize radical reform. Like many articles from The Medusa, this is a slightly altered version of an earlier text, published without reference to the original source. In this case, the text is lifted almost wholesale from R. Thompson, To the Public, alias "The Swinish Multitude." Jonathan Crary writes, "In the nineteenth century, for the first time, observable proof became needed in order to demonstrate that happiness and equality had in face been attained. Happiness had to be 'measurable in terms of objects and signs,' something that would be evident to the eye in terms of 'visible criteria'" (11; quoted material from Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation [Paris, 1970], 6). But as Fraser notes, Crary neglects the importance of touch, so evident in this passage from The Medusa, in his focus on the visual. Even assuming that the "gazer" is not Medusa, we cannot identify him. Barbara Judson asks, "Who is the gazer – Perseus, his predecessors, the painter, the poet, the reader? There are no clear-cut answers to these questions although all six stanzas are bent on nothing if not on describing the scene at hand and on situating the observer with respect to it" (167). Freud associates the mythological Medusa's head of snakes and petrifying gaze with castration anxiety in a posthumously published fragment, "Das Medusenhaupt" (1922). Freud's reading has influenced much scholarly work on literary Medusas, including literary criticism of Shelley's Medusa. While interrogations of Medusa's use as a gendered political symbol can be useful, to apply an anachronistic Freudian reading obscures the more specific historical associations attached to the Medusa. I use the term "viral witness" to describe readers and writers who "witnessed" events they might not have actually seen. Through them, the events recalled gained credence with each repetition, creating a history that, in the words of Ian Baucom, "is tautological, is that which proves itself by appealing to the accumulated sequence of testimonies to itself" (330). The term derives from Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's preference for the term "virtual witnessing" over "vicarious experience": as they note, "we wish to preserve the notion that virtual witnessing is a positive action, whereas vicarious experience is commonly held not to be proper experience at all" (60). I intend "viral witnessing" to connote the positive action of "virtual witnessing" as bidirectional: the witness does not just see, but reports, and in doing so creates new witnesses, who take the experience "viral." My thanks to Robert Mitchell for exploring these ideas with me. This Portrait of Beatrice Cenci, ca. 1662, oil on canvas, 64.5 x 49 cm, is now thought to be by Elisabetta Sirani. It hangs in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome. It can be seen at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cenci.jpg. Margot Harrison treats the entire play as commentary on the politics of public performance. Crary prefaces his investigation into the shift in the status of the observer in the early nineteenth century with the claim that an observer, "[t]hough obviously one who sees, … is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations" (6). Cenci, in the banquet scene, adroitly manipulates this limiting power of observation. Elisabeth G. Gitter notes the repeated link between hair and speech, between hair and truthful self-presentation, particularly in cases of raped women of literature, that will become particularly evident by the end of the nineteenth century. She mentions, for example, that Marty South of Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders (1886–1887) "is a Philomela, unable to speak and unable, bereft of her hair, to show who she really is" (946). We might consider Shelley's Beatrice an early example of this trope.