“Chasing Butterflies: Hawthorne, Titian Peale, and the Pursuit of Perfection” (original) (raw)

Abstract

“Chasing Butterflies: Hawthorne, Titian Peale, and the Pursuit of Perfection” Ellery Foutch Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844) considers the lone figure of the watchmaker-artist Owen Warland, who retreats from society in his pursuit of perfection, inspired by- and attempting to create anew- an elusive, transcendent butterfly. Due to its dramatic and highly visible metamorphosis, the butterfly was a potent nineteenth-century symbol of change, transformation, and the evanescence of beauty. In their highly visible transformations from earth-bound, homely caterpillars to brightly colored and patterned flying creatures, butterflies acquired spiritual resonance that evoked the human passage from earthly body to heavenly soul or spirit; in their ‘rebirth’ from the cocoon, butterflies were seen to parallel Christ’s resurrection. While some authors occasionally referred to the cocoon or chrysalis as a ‘sarcophagus’ or ‘tomb’, the adult butterfly was consistently referred to as the “perfect state” of the insect. Like Hawthorne or Warland, Titian Peale (1799-1885) was similarly transfixed by butterflies and moths, studying the insects throughout the course of his lifetime and creating delicate sketches, lithographs, oil paintings, and over a hundred butterfly boxes bound in leather and marbled paper, their specimens preserved between layers of glass. Peale’s scientific and artistic preservation of these butterflies was an attempt to forestall their decay, immortalizing their perfection and transforming them from natural creatures that interacted with their environment into static objects, incapable of either decay or future life, a theme Hawthorne evoked in both “The Artist” and “The Birthmark.” The structured composition of Peale’s butterfly boxes imposed order, control, and symmetry on these fluttering, evolving creatures, while his use of watch glass explicitly trapped them in a tool of preservation intimately linked with the consideration of the passage of time. This paper considers the tensions between metamorphosis and stasis, life and death, and the limitations of human representation in Peale and Hawthorne.

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