Passages Related to Alienation in "The Artist of the Beautiful"
Passages Related to Alienation in "The Artist of the Beautiful"
Andy's Butterfly Altered(photography by Andrew Martinez)
In this excerpt artist Owen Warland's contemporaries
assess his fascination with the beautiful and with art as mere madness.
Hawthorne observes that such a judgment is "soothing to the injured
sensibility of narrowness and dullness," a judgment as harsh in its
own way as the one made of Warland. Hawthorne goes on to suggest that
the artist or intellectual has always been judged this way: "From Saint
Paul's days, down to our poor little Artist of the Beautiful, the same
talisman had been applied to the elucidation of all mysteries in the
words or deeds of men, who spoke or acted too wisely or too well."
Even Annie, the love of Warland's life, has a secret scorn for his pursuit
of the beautiful, but Warland, understanding that Annie is a woman belonging
to a coarser world than the one he inhabits, remains
unaffected by her judgment, for Warland has found something finer in the
pursuit of his art than any other person might give him.
In this passage Hawthorne suggests the kind of aspirations
that drive all artists, not just Owen Warland, and may here be revealing
something of his own artistic ambition.
The conclusion of the tale leaves little doubt
that Owen has transcended any attachment to the actual physical butterfly
and has caught, in the act of creation, something much more valuable and rare
than the likes of Peter Hovenden will ever see.
Peter Hovenden, representative in Hawthorne's view of a large portion of
mankind, shares the popular perception that artistic creation is morally suspect,
the province of evil spirits, a perception not altogether rejected by Hawthorne
himself. The passage also illustrates Hovenden's mercantile blindness, his
inability to raise his sight above the "dusty" prizes one might find "along
the highway." It is no surprise, then, that Hovenden
is represented as Owen Warland's nemesis.
In a passage remarkable for what it reveals about the loneliness
of one devoted to artistic or intellectual pursuits, Hawthorne groups
poets, prophets, reformers, and criminals. Hester Prynne of The Scarlet
Letter comes immediately to mind as well as numerous other characters
from his stories and novels, individuals blessed and tortured with imagination
or aspirations that take them out of the mass of mankind.
