Mythology and Mythography in Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard's Two Men

Mythology and Mythography in ElizabethBarstow Stoddard’s Two Men

Michaela KeckCarl von Ossietzky University

1. Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard and the “Revival of Antiquity”

A curious mythological pair resurfaces with two of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard’s

characters in her second novel Two Men (1865): Mercury and the Sphinx. What is

more, in the end the two outsiders Jason (Mercury) and Philippa (the “American

Sphinx”) move into the ancestral Parke family home in New England, whereas the

direct male descendant goes into South American exile. The unlikely pair of Mercury

and the Sphinx enshrined in a New England house appears outright absurd and

nonsensical. However, this queer couple has a precedent in Renaissance art in

Raphael’s fresco The Council of the Gods (around 1518) in the Villa Farnesina in

Rome. Here we find Mercury next to the Sphinx at the very edge of the Olympian

gods and goddesses gathered to decide whether or not to accept Psyche into their

circle. In this early sixteenth-century Neoplatonic re-narration of the late Hellenistic

story of Amor and Psyche, the representation of such unlikely neighbours as well as

the overlap of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman myth is understandable. But what are we

to make of this mythological pair in an American novel from 1865? Stoddard herself

never travelled to Italy, and except for the fact that Philippa and Jason—like

Raphael’s Neoplatonic figures—also move at the fringes of the society they inhabit,

there is no direct connection that would solve their mysterious re-appearance.

The question as to the “continued revivals” (Gombrich 55) 1

Received: Sep. 15, 2010/ Accepted: Dec. 29, 2010

of classical

Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities 30 (Jan. 2011): 185-216

1 Georges Didi-Huberman claims that Warburg’s term “Nachleben” is a conscious “borrow[ing]

and displace[ment]” (“The Surviving Image” 59) of the term “survival” from the British

ethnologist Edward B. Tylor. But as Ernst H. Gombrich points out, the translation of

Warburg’s central question—“Was bedeutet das Nachleben der Antike?”—“has proved

difficult” (55). Gombrich translates the term differently: “How are we to interpret the

186_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

antiquity or ancient myth, occupied the German scholar Aby Warburg throughout his

life. Warburg believed that art and its reflection in images or, in truth, any kind of

illustrated object, determine the collective mental culture of a society.2 As Ernst H.

Gombrich underlines in his “Warburg Centenary Lecture”: “The originality of

Warburg’s approach lay precisely in the attempt to get through art at the mental image

behind it, to question not only paintings, but also literature, festivals, anything that

might reflect the ideas these people had in their minds” (40). Accordingly, Warburg

identified in the idealised forms of Renaissance art the “pathos formulae”3 of ancient

funerary and triumphal monuments that matched the understanding erudite

Renaissance circles had of the classical textual sources. With his emphasis on pathos,

that is, inner emotions expressed in exterior movement, Warburg’s understanding of

antiquity starkly contrasted with the calm repose and classical grandeur that

Winckelmann had observed. But Warburg also discovered that these highly stylized

images of pathos clashed and vied with Renaissance collectibles, tapestries from

Flanders, and Orientalist subjects. Warburg’s concept of Kulturwissenschaft (cultural

science) radically revised cultural history, in that he integrated the entire range of

humanistic disciplines and objected to the notion of history as a chronological

development or progressive unfolding of civilization. For Warburg the clash of

seemingly antithetical realities in terms of time and, to a certain extent also space, as,

for instance, in symbols taken from classical antiquity which were then revived and

used in the culture of Renaissance Florence, came to be an inherent tension in his

“theory of the polarity of the symbol” (Wind, Eloquence of Symbols 26).4

continued revivals of elements of ancient culture in Western civilization?” (55). Edgar Wind,

who knew Warburg personally, likewise uses the term “revival” (The Eloquence of Symbols

26).2 An important influence on Warburg was the cultural historian Karl Lamprecht who believed

that in order to understand a nation’s mentality, it was necessary to study material and mental

culture. He considered the arts “the only clear manifestation, or objectification, of intellectual

culture that could offer access to the mentality and collective psyche of the era in which the

art forms were produced” (Brush 68). Cf. Gombrich 39-40. 3 The term was coined by Warburg. According to Gertrud Bing, who worked with Warburg and

later edited his works, it has two implications: (1) the conventional use of “highly emphatic

gestures” (309) in Renaissance art, held together by (2) “a common expressive purpose” (309).

The emotional expression of these conventionalized visual gestures refers back to “purposeful

and forcible actions in the past […] when the re-enactment of the myth was a deeply stirring

emotional reality” (310). Despite the “attenuated form” in which this visual rhetoric has been

handed down to us, it is still able to evoke “a corresponding emotional response” (310) from

us today. 4 Unfortunately, Warburg himself never theorized his method. It was the art historian and

philosopher Edgar Wind (1900-1971) who elaborated on Warburg’s “Theory of the Polarity of

the Symbol” in his introduction to Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der

Antike (1931) and the essay collection The Eloquence of Symbols (21-35) which was

Michaela Keck_Mythology and Mythography_187

As Edgar Wind has shown, Warburg’s theory is indebted to Theodor Friedrich

Vischer’s definition of the symbol as “a connection of image and meaning” (Wind,

Eloquence of Symbols 27), a connection that is always temporary and subject to

change. Vischer’s example of the Eucharist controversy over whether the bread and

wine are or symbolize the body and blood of Christ illustrates the two extreme

symbolic configurations of the three levels that Warburg identifies as well: (1) the

“‘magical-linking’” (Warburg qtd. in Wind, Eloquence of Symbols 27) level when the

image and the meaning of the symbol are the same (bread and wine are the body and

blood of Christ); and (2) the “‘logically-dissociative’” (Warburg qtd. in Wind,

Eloquence of Symbols 27) level when the image and the meaning of the symbol are

distinct entities so that meaning is ascribed to the image intellectually or by logical

interpretation (bread and wine symbolize the body and blood of Christ). There is also

a third, critical level where, as Wind puts it, “the symbol is understood as a sign and

yet remains a living image, where the psychological excitation, suspended between

the two poles, is neither so concentrated by the compelling power of the metaphor that

it turns into action, nor so detached by the force of analytical thought that it fades into

conceptual thinking” (Wind, Eloquence of Symbols 28-29). It is in this intersphere, or

rather continuum, in-between the two extreme poles of magic and logic that “the

‘image,’ in the sense of artistic illusion, finds its place” (Wind, Eloquence of Symbols

29). Any form of artistic representation as well as its appreciation is, according to

Warburg, an ongoing struggle between the human impulses to either extreme. It is

important to understand that for Warburg the two poles of mythical-magical

“commitment” and logical-intellectual “detachment” (Wind, Eloquence of Symbols 29)

are never separate, but always connected. The expression through symbolic forms is

thus constituted by these contending forces which at times constrain, at other times

are conducive to the artistic expression,5

published posthumously in 1983.

or as Gombrich explains: “It is these mental

5 Cf. Wind: “Gerade das Symbol, das Spezifikum aller Kulturleistung,—sei es nun religiöses

oder staatliches, wissenschaftliches oder künstlerisches Symbol,—lebt von der Schwingung

zwischen diesen beiden Polen. Es ist Ausdruck einer seelischen Kraft, und sofern es nicht

mehr diese Kraft selbst ist, sondern deren Relikt, ist es ihr ‘entäußert’. Aber gerade in dieser

Entäußerung bleibt es Signal, Aufforderung für eine seelische Kraft, auf die es zurückweist

und durch die es wieder lebendig und bedeutsam, kurz:—‘verinnerlicht’ werden muß. […]

Nie aber darf die Spannung zwischen diesen beiden Polen in eine radikale Antithese

verwandelt werden. Denn selbst das abstrakt gewordene Zeichen, das den höchsten Grad der

Entäußerung darstellt, behält, sofern es überhaupt eine seelische Bedeutung hat und

‘verstanden’ werden kann, eine wenn auch noch so gelockerte Beziehung zur

Ausdrucksgestaltung bei. […] Der symbolische Charakter [am zu untersuchenden

Einzelobjekt] erschließt sich nur dem, der ihn als Auseinandersetzungsprodukt historisch

begreift und also auf die gegensätzlichen Kräfte und Energien zurückgeht, die sich in dieser

Auseinandersetzung—bald hemmend, bald fördernd—begegnen” (“Einleitung” IX).

Interestingly, in his essay “Culture,” the new historicist Stephen Greenblatt uses very similar


images with which the artist must wrestle, and the resultant style will be a product of

their strength and his power of self-assertion, his mental poise in either yielding or

dominating the impulses with which they are connected” (40). For Warburg, not only

artistic images but any cultural object resulted from and mediated the tension of

polarities between irrationality and rationality. Based upon this

psychological-anthropological theory of polarities, Warburg examined the cultural

object in terms of aesthetic reception as well as its process of production.6

Today we no longer use the term Kulturwissenschaft in the singular. Cultural

studies has replaced the idea of one, unified culture that determines a group’s, or a

nation’s mentality and cultural production. Interestingly, Warburg’s research is free

from ahistorical or universal tendencies since he

At the

same time, he put the results of his research into a larger framework of the human

experience in a particular historical and cultural context.

reject[ed] all claims to a Zeitgeist or other such generalities

concerning the psychological dimension of our being. He viewed

such formulations as liquidating the complex and often

contradictory forces that are at play in life. What he had learned

from his own work was that all such generalities made about time

and place dissolve […]. (Ostrow 3)

In the case of Elizabeth Stoddard we have to keep in mind that as a female

intellectual and author she held a marginal rather than a central position in

nineteenth-century American culture. What is more, although erudite, well-read,

knowledgeable in and appreciative of Euro-American culture, Stoddard enjoyed only

a moderate and rather late recognition for her novels. Throughout her life she was at

odds with the fact that her novels did not sell.7 To use the terms of the sociologist and

cultural anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu, Stoddard’s “capital” in the “cultural field”

has been growing steadily since the 1980s.8

terms in the context of his concept of culture: “constraint and mobility” (225).

The bulk of literary scholarship, however,

has mainly focused on her first novel The Morgesons (1862), whereas the amount of

6 For a more detailed explication of the differences between Vischer’s and Warburg’s

understanding of the symbol as well as Wind’s further development of Warburg’s theory of the

polarity of the symbol, see Bernhard Buschendorf’s essay “Zur Begründung der

Kulturwissenschaft. Der Symbolbegriff bei Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aby Warburg, und

Edgar Wind,” in Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph (227-248). 7 As a columnist for the Daily Alta California (1854-1858), Stoddard achieved much greater

popularity. Although she successfully sold many of her short stories, she deplored the

market-oriented compromises in doing so. She also wrote poetry and published a children’s

book for adults, Lolly Dinks’s Doings, in 1874 (Zagarell 1-34; Buell and Zagarell,

“Introduction” xi-xxv). 8 Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (1993).


research concerning Two Men (1865) and Temple House (1867) has remained sparse.

So far only Jennifer Putzi has illuminated the mythological elements of Two Men, e.g.,

the Sphinx or the cockatrice, which she relates to the political controversies

concerning national identity during the Civil War period.9

Hence, like Warburg, in this essay I will undertake the leap from classical

mythology to nineteenth-century American (literary) symbols as well as mental

culture to deepen the exploration of Stoddard’s use of mythology, with special

attention to the images inherent in her literary expression and style. Or, to borrow

Georges Didi-Huberman’s formulation, I will deliberately embark on an anachronistic

“knowledge-montage” (“Foreword” 12) to examine the revival and representation of

mythology and mythography in Stoddard’s novel Two Men. In doing so, my interests

lie in (1) how Stoddard revives and re-creates the presentation of mythology with the

help of traditional (iconographical) elements at the same time that she adapts and

exploits them to suit her own purposes; and (2) in the significance of Stoddard’s

reception of myth for the material and mental culture of nineteenth-century American

society as seen through the lens of a marginalized female intellectual at a point in

history when the U.S. stood at the crossroads between the Civil War and

Reconstruction. For a better understanding and due to the convoluted narration of Two

Men, a brief plot summary will precede my analysis.

2. Elizabeth Stoddard’s Two Men

The narrative of Two Men evolves around the Parke family who lives in a

formerly prosperous New England coastal town. The fortunes and misfortunes of the

Parkes, and all those whose lives are closely associated with them, unfold in a

microcosm that reflects the enormous socio-political, racial, and economic

transformations in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The

old patriarchal order, personified in the authoritarian Squire Parke, is increasingly

falling apart. It dissolves into an uncomfortable coexistence between the remnants of

past hierarchies and hitherto excluded elements, be they female, of foreign nationality,

or otherwise underprivileged. The fate of Parke Auster, the Squire’s great-grandson,

illustrates this development.

His mother, Sarah, raises him with the goals of having the interrupted male line

of the family heritage continue and Parke re-assume the role as authority in the house,

the family, and the town. But in spite of Parke’s eagerness, fortunate circumstances,

and good looks, it is his patriarchal and sexually dominant personality that thwarts all

expectations and causes his self-imposed exile. Philippa, his South American cousin,

grows to adore and love the handsome, manly Parke. He, however, after a brief flirt

with her school friend Theresa, begins a sexual liaison with the beautiful Charlotte

Lang, the illegitimate daughter of a white man from the South and a former slave.

9 Cf. Jennifer Putzi, “The ‘American Sphinx’ and the Riddle of National Identity in Elizabeth

Stoddard’s Two Men” (183-201); and Putzi, “Introduction” xxxiiff.


This relationship proves to be fatal for Charlotte, as well as for Parke’s mother, and

although it is temporarily painful for Philippa and brings to the fore her own racist

prejudices, it liberates her from her obsession with Parke. In the end, the family

property and money are split in half, and, together with her former guardian, Jason

Auster, Philippa comes to inhabit the ancestral house.

Like Philippa, Jason is an outsider. A former carpenter, his marriage to Sarah

introduces him to the landed New England aristocracy, but he never becomes an

accepted member of the ruling class. Contrary to his wife, he has no interest in male

authority, a character trait that neither Sarah nor his son Parke considers a positive

quality. He thus leads a life on the periphery of the family, as well as the town. He

falls in love with Philippa, who has eyes only for Parke. Jason therefore represses his

passion and does not reveal it until after Sarah’s death and some time after Parke’s

departure to Venezuela. Eventually, Philippa comes to return his love, and the novel

closes with the contrast between the unlikely pair of outsiders in the old Parke house

in New England and the two idolized men, Parke and Philippa’s father Osmond, on

the hunt in Venezuela’s countryside.

2.1. Stoddard’s “Feast of the Gods”

A key scene and prime example of Stoddard’s “discrepant” style as a means to

“illustrate life” is chapter X, whose outstanding mythological imagery and stylization

may be the reason why it has always been omitted in the analysis of Two Men. Jason,

Parke, minister Ritchings, Philippa, and her school friend Theresa are headed towards

Pitt’s Island for a picnic. The transition to the semi-classical, semi-contemporary

interlude on the island begins subtly, increases, and then ends in Hawthornian fashion:

“[…] they felt dazed—like those who come from a distant, different land, into a

forgotten home” (Two Men 79).

First, Stoddard superimposes two types of ancient gods on the figure of Jason:

cast in the conventional reclining posture of an ancient river god with an oar in one

hand, he also wears the wide-brimmed pétasos, symbol of Hermes, the god of

travellers: “He was half lying, half sitting; his right hand was on the tiller, his left

under his head, his legs were crossed in the air, and his face was half hid by an old felt

hat, which was very much crushed” (Two Men 71). Parke’s and Theresa’s mutual

attraction is also expressed in mythological terms: “The voices of the syrens [sic] rose

from the depths of the sea, and a wild, sweet, delicious melody floated round the pair”

(Two Men 73). These manifold mythological references envelope the leisurely party

in a mood of romance and pleasure, shot through with a sense of timelessness and

danger, deriving from the underlying myths. While Jason’s impersonation of ancient

river god and Hermes is suitable for a safe passage over water, the sirens evoke the

disquieting images of Odysseus bound to the mast, floating past winged hybrid

monsters. Jane Ellen Harrison has called the contrast between the alluring song of the

sirens and their repellent outward appearance an “aesthetic shock” (146). This shock

lends the atmosphere a sense of the surreal, which increases when the party arrives on


the island. Here the mood shifts from adventurous voyage to festive-burlesque

Arcadia. The ivy-shaped leaves and red berries of “the wild shining smilax” that

Theresa wreathes “round Parke’s hat and her own” (Two Men 75) ornament the pair

with the characteristic attributes of Bacchus. Their “playing gods” on the elevated

spot they have chosen for their picnic is not lost upon themselves, and their

playfulness and joking parallels the exuberance of a classical bacchanal revelry.10

As Edgar Wind has shown, Giovanni Bellini’s painting The Feast of the Gods is

an example of the playful depiction of bacchic revelry in the facetious and

mock-heroic style that aimed to “laugh at the pagan gods” (Wind, Feast of the Gods

7).

Indeed, in her representation of this feast of the gods, Stoddard adapts the convention

of the playful “laughter at the gods.”

11

In their introduction to Stoddard’s Stories, Susanne Opfermann and Yvonne

Roth emphasize the importance of humour in Stoddard’s writing. Although

Stoddard’s “semi-satirical tone” often exposes her regional characters to ridicule, they

argue, it “is never used to make readers lose respect for the characters”

(“Introduction” xx). Yet, Stoddard’s characters are never shown to be prudish either.

The painting is rendered in a style that superimposes the portraits of

contemporary individuals on mythological portraits. In this way, they are shown to

impersonate ancient gods celebrating, drinking, and in amorous pursuit in a comical

revelry which at the time was considered “a reward for virtue” (Wind, “Feast of the

Gods” 48). Hence, these portraits must be understood as a tool of self-fashioning that

leaves room for parody, travesty, as well as self-critique that gave way to a roaring,

even bawdy, laugh rather than a rigid or scathing criticism of the portrayed

individuals.

10 Pretending to be on the mythical Parnassus, Theresa waxes poetic: “‘Ringed with the azure

world,’ […] we sit upon this smooth, elastic, red mat, commonly called pine needles”; and

Parke likewise quibbles: “And ‘like a thunderbolt we’ll fall’—on the repast which awaits us

in the shadow of yon towering tree. Come, sylvan goddess, the minister has spread the cloth,

and put a stone on each corner of it to keep it from fluttering” (Two Men 76). Theresa finally

exclaims: “Let us never go into the world of human beings!” (Two Men 78).

The conscious performance of mythical gods by Theresa and Parke, strongly calls forth

Stoddard’s “first connection with the stage” (qtd. in Putzi, “Introduction” xxxiv). Apparently

her friend, the Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, lived with the Stoddards while she worked

on the manuscript of Two Men. Looking back on that phase of her life in later years Stoddard

wrote: “That period of my life was the most dramatic—[…] Edwin Booth & his young wife

almost lived with us […] our first connection with the stage made life scintillate, as if a sword

was drawn from its scabbard” (qtd. in Putzi, “Introduction” xxxiv). I consider her involvement

in the theatre to constitute an important source of influence and inspiration in terms of visual

representations, an influence that has not been sufficiently explored so far.11 The Feast of the Gods was originally completed by Bellini in 1514 when he was already

about 80 years old. Later Titian retouched the painting and added changes to Bellini’s original

(Wind, Feast of the Gods 38ff).


The picnic is as frolicsome as frivolous and although there is no wine, Stoddard’s

representation of the picnic is as erotically charged as the ancient bacchanalian

gatherings of the gods or the classical parodies of Ovid and Apuleius:12 “There is no

plum-cake here, Mr. Ritchings” (Two Men 76), Philippa remarks to Mr. Ritchings, but

the (sexual) pun of rejection in her remark is obviously lost on her ardent suitor,

possibly even herself.13 In contrast, Theresa and Parke take pleasure in their ribald

repartees:

“Oh, how happy I am,” sighed Theresa, with her mouth full of

chicken.

“I am too,” said Parke, taking a bit of tart.

“Are the others as happy, think?” she asked.

“If they are as hungry.”

“Animal!” (Two Men 76-77)

Thus, in tone and mood the New England picnic mimics the tradition of

mythological burlesque and erotica from Ovid to Shakespeare and later European

literature and art. The adaptation of the mock-heroic style allows Stoddard to pursue

her experimental form of artistic expression by investing her characters with two

faces—a mythological and a contemporary American one. In this way, she can

display their flaws and limitations without renouncing “the ideal,” that is, their

underlying passions. What, then, are the “two faces” of her characters? In fact, what

emerges beneath Theresa’s and Parke’s rollicking impersonation of the ancient gods

is an adapted modern version of the story of Priapus and Lotis as narrated in Ovid’s

Fasti and visualized in Giovanni Bellini’s painting The Feast of the Gods.

As Ovid relates, gods, satyrs and nymphs gather at the feet of sacred Mount Ida.

As the wine begins to flow, “amorous fires” (Fasti I, 411) are kindled amongst the

revellers. Priapus, god of fertility and the protector of the gardens, is infatuated by

Lotis (in a later passage it is the goddess Vesta) and secretly approaches her once she

has fallen asleep after too much drink. Just as he is about “to snatch the wished-for

hour” and, with joyful anticipation, “draw[s] from off her feet the quilt” (Fasti I,

431-32), his sexual advances are interrupted when “Silenus saddle-ass, with raucous

weasand braying, gave out an ill-timed roar” (Fasti I, 433-34). The awakened nymph

escapes, Priapus is discovered in full sexual arousal, much to the amusement of the

gods present, and the indiscrete “ass” is killed.

12 Cf. Wind 7; also, the studies by Hendrik Müller (1998) and Judith Hindermann (2009) deal

with intertextuality, the parallels between the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius, as well as

Apuleius’s adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in matters of love and the elegiac discourse. 13 The plum is an obvious play on female genitalia like other fruits such as, e.g., the apricot,

the quince, or the peach. In the Victorian language of flowers the plum is also said to

correspond less provocatively to the words “keep your promises” (Seaton188-189; Todd 188).


Ovid relates the story of Priapus twice (Fasti I, 391-440; VI, 319-48). He

justifies this repetition with the aetiological purposes of the Fasti, that is, to explain

why every year a donkey is sacrificed to the phallic deity and also used in the rites of

the goddess Vesta. Clearly, the narrator enjoys the telling of the piquant details and

suggestive puns which barely hide his rollicking laughter at Priapus’s disgraceful, yet

comical story: “est multi fabula parva ioci” (Fasti VI, 320).14

Stoddard’s picnic scene is the first instance of Parke’s pursuit of beautiful

women. Theresa’s parallels to the nymph Lotis become most obvious in the final

scene between her and Parke: “‘Shall I ever again have so beautiful an hour as this,

Parke? […]’ She clasped the trunk of a pine, and signed to him to go on” (Two Men

79). The scene alludes to Lotis’s escape from Priapus through her transformation into

a lotus tree: “[…] Lotis, a nymph, while fleeing from Priapus’ vile pursuit, had taken

refuge in this shape [of the water-lotus], changed as to features but keeping still her

name” (Ovid, Metamorphoses IX, 346-47). Contrary to his mythological predecessor,

Parke is not caught with his pants down and the attraction between him and his

“nymph” Theresa is mutual. But his pursuit similarly results in sexual frustration:

except for a kiss, their relationship is not consummated. Instead of the Fasti’s roaring

laughter from the audience (both within and outside of the text), in each encounter

Stoddard creates a noticeable tension between erotic attraction, flirtatiousness, and

desire on the one hand, and a sense of mistrust and recklessness on the other. Paul

Murgatroyd has observed that in the Lotis passage of Ovid’s Fasti “it was Priapus

alone who lost his dignity,” but that in the second, much shorter passage, “Vesta also

loses hers” (624). Similarly, for Theresa the adventure with Parke proves tempting but

not dangerous. Parke’s next conquest proves fatal for his lover Charlotte Lang,

whereas he, instead of shamefacedly escaping to Venezuela, as the mythological

Priapus surely would have, proudly decides by himself to leave the country.

An interesting twist in Stoddard’s mythological adaptation is the reaction of the

“audience” in Parke’s second chase. In Ovid, the company is outraged at Priapus’s lie

that he did not know it was Vesta he tried to rape (Fasti VI, 335-36). In Two Men

Parke decides to marry Charlotte while the New England village is shown to be less

scandalized about Parke’s behaviour than about Charlotte’s racial status and

miscegenation.15

14 Ovid’s linking of the second passage to the tradition of the “ioci” underlines the “added

humor” and the “extra stimulation and enjoyment” (623) that Paul Murgatroyd discerns in the

passage of Vesta, as well as the creativity and inventiveness of Ovid as an author (Graf 115ff).

But it also evokes the “playful forms (‘ioci’) of cultivated discourse” (Weinrich 13) that would

become so popular among European Renaissance humanists.

It is a mistake, however, to assume that Charlotte is cast in the

stereotypical role of the “tragic mulatta” who falls prey to Parke’s Priapic urges, as

Regula Giovani argues about Two Men (134-36). Stoddard mingles her mythological

imagery with floral language in a manner that complicates, as well as frustrates, any

clear picture of female exploitation and victimization.

15 On miscegenation in Two Men, see Lisa Radinovsky 202-31.


2.2. Stoddard’s Floral Grotesques

While at a first glance Stoddard’s use of flower language suggests that Theresa

and Charlotte are potential pray to Parke’s sexual conquest, the floral imagery lacks

the sentiment of many of the Victorian flower books whose pathos seeped into

nineteenth-century fiction. 16 While flower books have often been pejoratively

labelled sentimentalist, the language of flowers is also part of the unsentimental

literature of authors such as Mary Wilkins Freeman or Sarah Orne Jewett. Quite a

number of authors used floral language sarcastically or ironically, e.g., Lydia

Sigourney or Emily Dickinson. Furthermore, as Elizabeth Anne Petrino points out,

flower language can serve as “a rhetoric of ‘silent eloquence,’” that is, a medium to

convey women’s “feelings that were unacceptable to a reading public and stake out

new emotional territory for themselves” (130). Stoddard herself was a great lover of

flowers and knew them very well.17

The so-called “grottesche” made their first appearance in European art during the

Italian Renaissance when, after the discovery of Nero’s infamous “Domus Aurea” in

1480, artists haunted the ruined palace, fascinated by the bizarre underground frescoes

and stucco ornaments.

In Two Men, however, I consider her use of

flower language and imagery not to express personal delight but to function as an

aesthetic device in the style of the grotesque. It provokes curiosity, puzzlement, as

well as laughter, a laughter that oscillates between the occasional roar and comic

relief in the face of a strange, at times even hostile environment. But it is also a

grotesque that asserts difference and alterité.

18

16 The nineteenth-century craze for flower books climaxed during the 1840s and 1850s and

manifested itself in gift books, botanical treatises, almanacs, dictionaries and anthologies,

poetry, Christian and esoteric season’s books, which were commonly illustrated, some very

lavishly by hand-coloured engravings, others were printed in new colour-printing techniques.

Frances Sargent Osgood, for instance, was a very popular author who combined poetry with

botanical writing. The flower language invaded all levels of American culture: female names,

emblems, calendars, fortune telling games, advertisements (cf. Seaton 84-111; Petrino

129-60).

In spite of the decidedly pagan overtones of such

mythological-fantastical elements as harpies, sirens, sphinxes, as well as griffins,

dragons, and centaurs, the grotesque decorations soon invaded all of Italian culture,

including the religious sphere. Combining forms of human beings, animals, plants,

fruit and vegetable forms, they constituted an art that was first applied to decorate

frames and pilasters, but soon spilled over into an all-pervading style as, for instance,

17 Stoddard’s “Journal” from 1866, which is reprinted in the edition of The Morgesons by Buell

and Zagarell, shows Stoddard’s delight in and appreciation of flowers, outdoors as well as for

indoor decoration (347-59). 18 Dorothea Scholl’s extensive study of the “grottesche” in the Italian Renaissance gives an

excellent overview and introduction to the phenomenon and does away with the widespread

conviction that there existed no theoretical debate of the grotesque in literature before

Rabelais. Cf. Schmarsow 131-44; and Phillips 14-23.


the Sphinx in Raphael’s fresco The Council of the Gods.19 As Dorothea Scholl

explains, as an aesthetic category the grotesque may either affirm or undermine the

dominant aesthetics, or it may be itself an autonomous category, usually subsumed

under the aesthetics of the ugly and comical. However, the scale of the grotesque has

manifold nuances and may range from the demonical-nightmarish, coarsely-comical,

and excessive to the collective, ironical, fragmentary and different in a most positive

sense (Scholl 20-28). The term is also significant in a daily cultural context and

implies hybridism and the interconnectedness of a variety of genres, styles, and

discourses. Scholl further discerns the grotesque as a para-aesthetics which

accompanies, playfully glides around, as well as foils literature and the arts in a

fluctuating yet persistent manner like a linea serpentinata (16-17).20

In Stoddard’s Two Men, the images of flowers, as well as of Mercury and the

Sphinx, belong to a grotesque that contains as many flourishes as ruptures and that

presents the world to be fragmentary and thus alternately mysterious, alienating,

excessive, and comical. Even though Stoddard’s flower imagery can be as profoundly

ambiguous as the image of Mercury and the Sphinx (to which I shall return at the end

of this essay), the most striking aspect is its revealing nature in terms of femininity

and sexuality.

Theresa’s first association with the pine tree—a symbol for “hardiness,”

“boldness,” and “light” (Seaton 188-89) —underlines the parallels the nymph Lotis in

her attractiveness, intellectual capacities, as well as her ultimate “escape” from the

Priapic Parke. Theresa’s collections of grasses and sea-weeds further associate her

with the ancient nymphs which were seen as guides for those who sought to overcome

blind passion and attain a love illuminated by the spirit (Moog-Grünewald 478). The

spiritual-religious overtones gone, Theresa’s association with the nymphs underscores

her passion for the outdoors so similar to Cassandra Morgeson’s close affinity to the

sea;21

19 Art historians have pointed out the uniqueness of Raphael’s mythological cycle. Among

other significant transformations of Apuleius’s tale of Amor and Psyche, the fresco features

Mercury as a major protagonist, which, as Michaela Marek explains, points to the significance

that Mercury as the god of trade and the patron of erudition held for the owner of the villa,

Agostino Chigi, a banker and humanist patron (287-88). In contrast to Mercury, the Sphinx

has no active role and has been taken to be a purely decorative element.

but it also emblematizes Theresa’s, as well as Cassandra’s, struggle to enter a

relationship not based on physical attraction only, but also on the intellect in order to

20 I find Scholl’s definition of the grotesque most fruitful for a better understanding of

Stoddard’s aesthetics. However, I do not share her assumption that whenever the grotesque is

especially prevalent it signals a change of paradigms and a transition in the development and

sequence of different aesthetics and periods. Not only does this assume and reinforce

conventional historical-periodic classifications which, at least in Stoddard’s care are hardly

helpful; but I also consider it an insufficient, even contradictory, explanation for the grotesque

as a continued and continuing para-aesthetics.21 Cf. Two Men, 62-63; Morgesons 213-15.


achieve a companionate union. In Two Men this struggle culminates in Theresa’s

decision to separate from Parke.22

Charlotte is associated with the Calla Ethiopia, a snowy-white flower from

Africa. Referred to as a white lily and said to symbolize “feminine modesty” (Seaton

170-71), at first glance it confirms the analogy between Charlotte and Vesta, the

goddess of chastity. Yet, as Bobby J. Ward points out, it is not a “true […] lily or

calla” (46). The seemingly pure and modest flower carries the connotations of sexual

intercourse and much better matches its second symbolic meaning, “ardour” (Todd

37), as manifest in the introductory depiction of Charlotte: “she was so tall, slender,

bending, and graceful, her complexion so smooth and opaque, and the curves of her

face so beautiful. Her lips were always parted, her wistful light-blue eyes widely

opened” (Two Men 97). One should think that Stoddard, with her love and knowledge

of flowers, was aware of this second meaning. Opinions about the figure of Charlotte

diverge: Giovani maintains that the Calla Lily shows her as a fragile mulatta whose

fate is about to be sealed (135). In contrast, Putzi stresses that Charlotte is a figure

who is “far more complicated than the ‘tragic mulatta’” and endowed “with the

strength to face her accusers” even though her death “indicate[s] failure on Stoddard’s

part to think beyond the seduction plot” (“Introduction” xliii). Putzi insists that

“Charlotte is decidedly not representative of black women’s uncontrollable sexuality”

(“Introduction” xliii). While the sexually explicit portrait of Charlotte presents her by

no means as the fragile stereotype that Giovani sees in her, the emphasis on

Charlotte’s sexuality still makes it a puzzling, even troubling portrait of an

African-American woman. What is more, in flower language the Calla Lily is also

associated with the cuckoo’s fathering of birds of a different species (Todd 37; Ward

47). This association repeats the novel’s underlying motif of ambiguous origins, but

also carries racial overtones that has biological-genetic implications.

In a later encounter with Philippa, Charlotte is depicted gathering violets, flowers

that symbolize “modesty,” “love,” and “faithfulness” (Todd 71; Seaton 196-97; Ward

362-68). She offers them to Philippa who only sees her as “a dark, vague shape,

whose coming overpowered her with hate and horror” (Two Men 160). This certainly

complicates Charlotte’s figure, and it appears to me that the duplicity inherent in the

image of the Calla Ethiopia points out (1) the cultural biases inherent in American

society’s perception of Charlotte; and (2) Stoddard’s attempt at depicting a woman

torn between her own sexual drives and the restrictions, as well as dependencies

forced upon her by the male-dominated and racially obsessed culture and society she

lives in. In fact, the subject had been occupying Stoddard since the 1860s. We find a

similar attempt to come to grips with the labels enforced upon women concerning

their sexuality and their race in the character studies of two women, one white, the

22 Cassandra is saved from a first disastrous love affair with her cousin Charles by a carriage

accident. Later she requests from her future husband Desmond to put space and time between

them to decide and reflect upon their future relationship (227).


other a Cuban quadroon, in her short story “Eros and Anteros” from 1862.23

By appropriating the popular, contemporary flower language and imagery into

her adaptation of the mythological story of Priapus, Stoddard propels the women into

the story as equal (sexual) players, interrogating the (sexual-racial) stereotypes that

determine their lives. Also, like Raphael’s integration of the Sphinx in the vault fresco

of the Villa Farnesina, Stoddard extends the flower language from a mere ornament

into an integral, visible, and sizeable element of her overall grotesque style and

aesthetics. With her floral grotesques, Stoddard lights out for a modernist feminine

territory in which her characters emerge as singular individuals who are ravishingly

beautiful, sexually active, even provocative, and yet surprisingly different in their

femininity.

Even if

Stoddard’s floral imagery in Two Men hints at the object status that the women have

for Parke, it does by no means represent either of them in an objectified manner. On

the contrary, like the animal image of the “leopardess” (100) in “Eros and Anteros,”

Stoddard’s flower images in Two Men show the woman to be active agents in the

ancient contestation of the sexes. It appears to me that particularly Charlotte’s flower

portrait challenges the male and female preconceptions in a manner that Anne

Middleton Wagner suspects behind the flower images of Georgia O’Keeffe, namely

to present them as if to say: “You want feminine, I’ll give you feminine” (98). The

refusal to cast her characters into a certain mould—and also to be cast into a certain

category as a female author—is also expressed in the most comical of flower images

in Two Men: pondering what Philippa reminds him of, Jason suddenly remembers:

“The tiger-lily in the back garden, which Ike had barked at the day before!” (Two Men

60). A flower that defies a dog that is used to go on the hunt positively upsets all

preconceived notions of femininity, and still, it mystifies and fascinates.

24

23 “Eros and Anteros” was published in the weekly paper New York Leader in 1862. The story

relates the struggle of a female first-person narrator with the “bounds [her fiancé King] has

marked out” (97) for her: she is to be the “good, clear-minded [white American woman]—her

perceptions sharp, ready to be acted upon, yet always so beautifully reticent” (96). King

opposes her to a female type that “is represented by an animal—a leopard, say; a creature of

pure instincts, and no more answerable for what she is, and what she does, than an animal is”

(96). While the narrator at first submits to King’s imagined female “specimen,” she later

confronts King in the presence of the “leopardess” (100) only to find that she, too, is a woman

who suffers from such patronizing labelling and her dependencies on it. However, the story’s

focalization has the equally troublesome character traits of the African Cuban, Garcia, appear

in the light of the female narrator’s biases and limitations.

Certainly indecorous, Stoddard’s grotesque style and expression

24 In The Morgesons, the floral grotesque is most obvious in the figure of Veronica Morgeson.

An “elfish creature” (13) who “ordered handfuls [of grass] to be brought her and put in

saucers of water” (27), yet sickly and consumptive, as well as “full of tricks” (13), Veronica

gives the nymph’s traditional image as the embodiment of beauty and the union of the

extremes of love a most bizarre shape. In her short fiction Stoddard also plays on the

ambiguities of floral meanings, e.g., in her short story “Tuberoses.” Signifying


nevertheless valorises their individual womanhood, passion, and sexuality. Stoddard

thus precedes the early modernist paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe’s various close-ups

of Calla Lilies and other flowers, or Clara Tice’s erotic female nudes—alone, with/as

plants, or on animals—which, like Stoddard’s “leopardess,” would provocatively

bring female sexuality to the fore.25

Like her mythological imagery, Stoddard’s flower portraits display the

ambiguous and unexplored feminine qualities in her New England individuals in a

much more pronounced manner than any of her literary predecessors and

contemporaries. The same holds true for her equivocal renderings of the Priapic Parke

and his antagonist Jason, who provide the starkest contrast in Two Men.26

2.3. Stoddard’s “Two Men:” Priapus meets Mercury

In fact,

oscillating between fool—or “ass”—and genius, Jason is refracted through the lens of

yet another mythological figure that, as in Bellini’s Feast of the Gods, or Raphael’s

frescos in the Villa Farnesina, likewise assumes a prominent role. It is the role of

Hermes the multi-faced son of Zeus, messenger of the gods, mystagogue,

psychopomp, magician, and trickster.

Until today, the western reception of Hermes, or Mercury, from Renaissance

literature and the fine arts has had a lasting influence upon the perception of his

qualities and value and generated an explosion of works dealing with the ancient

god.27

“voluptuousness” (Todd 173), but also “sentiment” and “dangerous pleasures” (Seaton

196-97), the ambiguous meanings capture the various twists and turns of the story. Deciding

upon appearances, two suitors woo the sisters Clara and Charlotte and end up proposing

marriage to the sister they do not love—both are rejected. For George Gareth this results in a

rash departure to the Civil War front where a skirmish leaves him wounded, lame, but still in

love. While his love suit proves successful in the end in spite of the high costs, it remains

unclear whether the other suitor, John, will ever return Charlotte’s love.

Most of all, Giambologna’s bronze Mercury (1580) for the Medici conquered

25 Although the flower images brought Georgia O’Keeffe fame and success, they brought with

them the reductionist label of female eroticism and sexuality which O’Keeffe fought against

for the rest of her life (Fryd 117-52). As to Clara Tice, I particularly refer to such artworks as

Female Plant (c. 1916), Nude with Leaf (c. 1917), Nude Sitting Atop an Animal (c. 1922),

Leda and Swan at Night (c. 1927) or Fish (c. 1935). For Stoddard’s connection with Tice, as

well as an overview over her works, I am indebted to the catalogue raisonné of Patricia

Günter’s dissertation “Clara Tice Rediscovered.” 26 For Radinovsky it is clear that “[t]he two men of the novel’s title are Jason Auster and his

son, Parke” (203), whereas Putzi and Regula Giovani insist that this is by no means obvious

and that various combinations make sense. According to Giovani “Two Women would be a

more fitting title” (147-48; Putzi, “Introduction” xlviii).27 Antoine Faivre’s traces the emergence and importance of Hermes Trismegistos in Western

culture from antiquity to the twentieth century in The Eternal Hermes. From Greek God to


the homes and gardens of western countries. In nineteenth-century America

inexpensive cast-iron Mercury statues were readily available (Grissom 212-213)

before the second industrial revolution revitalized bronze casting. Portrayed with his

characteristic herald’s staff (caduceus), winged cap and sandals, Giambologna’s

Mercury has impressed his weightless upwards leap upon the western iconographic

memory. The pose represents the travel motif and Mercury’s role of messenger of the

gods, who crosses over from the earth to the heavens, mediating between the human

world and the gods. The Renaissance greatly valued Hermes Trismegistos as an

initiator to profound, secret self-knowledge and cosmic wisdom, and thus reduced the

ancient multi-faceted god to that image. Romantic literature adapted Hermes

Trismegistos and transformed him into a deeply mystical Mercury figure that

permeates the prose and poetry of nineteenth-century English and American writers

(Moog-Grünewald 350; Faivre 190-91).28

In view of this positive but one-sided iconography, it is all the more surprising

that Stoddard associates the rapacious, ridiculously virile mythological Priapus with

the “beautiful,” well-mannered and “winning” (Two Men 39) Parke and the gauche,

“eccentric” (Two Men 65) Jason with the elegant and wise Mercury.29

Alchemical Magus. For an overview of the reception of Hermes/Mercury from antiquity to

modernity in literature and the arts, see Moog-Grünewald’s Der Neue Pauly. Supplemente. Vol.

5. Mythenrezeption, 344-51. In late antiquity the ancient Greek Hermes begins to take on

characteristics of other gods, among them Mercury, the Roman god of trade (346). Edgar

Wind explicates the mediating role of Mercury in the Renaissance arts, particularly in matters

of celestial love and with the example of Botticelli’s Primavera in Pagan Mysteries in the

Renaissance (139ff). The multiple faces and meanings of Hermes in Greek culture, as well as

their changing representations in different classical sources, are put together by Karl Kerényi

in Hermes Guide of Souls. Florian Ebeling’s Das Geheimnis des Hermes Trismegistos focuses

on the idea of Hermes Trismegistos from its origins to esoteric notions in the 20th century.

Lewis Hyde includes Hermes as trickster figure into a wide variety of cultural trickster figures

and patterns in western and eastern cultures in Trickster Makes This World. Mischief, Myth,

and Art.

Already in the

introductory chapters, Jason is portrayed to lose his youthful socialist ideals and

appears to be another of Stoddard’s protagonists unaffected and untouched by

28 According Ebeling, Hermes Trismegistos is a purely fictional figure that originated in the

fusion of the Egyptian God Thot and the Greek Hermes in the 2nd century BC (19-22). 29 Parke is uniformly perceived as the ideal, beautiful male from childhood on by his family

and the town. As a child, he is adored as “a handsome boy” (Two Men 24). Jason describes the

contrast between him and the youthful Parke thus: “Books, music, fine talk, did not suit

[Jason]; they were for Parke, who became them so well” (Two Men 61); and in Philippa’s eyes,

Parke embodies l’homme fatale: “Parke’s serene, marble-like brow, the faint bloom coming

and going in his cheeks, his large, sensitive eyes, his firm, beautifully cut mouth, the

indescribable, unconscious grace of his attitudes, the movement of his head, and his air of

repose and self-possession, proved him worthy of Philippa’s ideal” (Two Men 106).


religious passion, and more often than not, doubtful of the existence of a

transcendental saviour. Desmond Somers final lines in The Morgesons, “God is the

Ruler, […]. Otherwise let this mad world crush us now” (253) are programmatic.30

Jason’s philosophical soliloquy on the imaginary Parnassus in Two Men corroborates

the scepticism of a higher order:

There is something in this scene, Mr. Ritchings, beyond ethics; it

confounds and annihilates them. […] A man does not value the

Creator so much here; he thinks of the created. Here falls the crown

of humanity upon his head in its circle of beauty, suffering, and

uncertainty. The speechless air, the deaf earth, the blindness of

substance—what do they but render us back vagueness for

vagueness? Why was Christ tempted on a mount? […] I think Christ

was tempted with the loss of faith in his heroic mission. (Two Men

77)

Jason’s words seem to turn Mercury’s role as an initiator to transcendental

knowledge and conductor to the heavenly sphere on its head. Yet, it is by no means

clear whether Jason renounces merely the existence of a personal godhead, or whether

he denies the numinous altogether, even in matter. Although he does not depict nature

as a medium in which humankind loses itself in a religious-mystical experience, there

still is admiration for nature, for humankind, even for Christ’s “heroic mission” (Two

Men 77). Also, Jason sets out negating the presence of morality in the universe only to

end his speech by affirming to believe in what he feels. What he feels, however, is not

devoid of ethics at all. Indeed, Jason stands out as a character who, at least most of the

time, still possesses and acts according to an ethical standard, and who rejects a

hedonistic way of life. His respect for life and “the Other” in persons, as well as in

nature, makes him the most heroic, and perhaps most sympathetic, among Stoddard’s

cast in Two Men. Though disillusioned with the world and the human character, Jason

is shown to possess an ingrained sense of honesty and justness, as well as a strong

independence from exterior influences. Although deeply passionate, he is not ruled by

his whims and desires, or driven by an urge to subordinate and manipulate others.31

30 Desmond’s lines are programmatic not only for Stoddard’s novels, but for her entire body of

works. In her late short story “A Study for a Heroine” (1885), like Cassandra Morgeson, the

heroine Sarah Brett is depicted to be “not ‘goody’ at all,” but fond of “reading a clever novel,”

and playing whist and backgammon; to be “as lively as useful in […] picnics and sailing

parties”; and when a great revival sweeps the region, she attends all the meetings, but sits

“unmoved” (“Heroine” 58).31 Although Jason’s non-interference in the wheeling and dealing of the Parke clan and the

town could also be said to be his biggest flaw, it qualifies him well for Mercury’s “cloak of

shamelessness” which Lewis Hyde pictures as “a garment that shields him from [the]

collective spell,” that is, “the picture of the world implied by his elders’ morality, and […] the


How, then, are we to understand this speech which combines two characteristic

qualities of Mercury after all—eloquence and mystery?

Since Jason’s enigmatic soliloquy functions as much as a catalyst as the

“braying of the ass” in Ovid’s Fasti,32

Although less hyperbolic than Theresa’s and Parke’s performance of the ancient

gods, Jason’s impersonation of Mercury becomes evident through the emphasis of his

changeable nature on the island. By ensuring a safe journey, and by saving Philippa

from a snake’s bite before carrying her swiftly uphill as if on winged sandals, Jason

complies with the role of Mercury as the protector of the travellers:

I suggest to read it in the spirit of the

mock-heroic tradition with Mercury in the role of ancient trickster whose powers of

disruption are mostly ignored in Romantic literature and art. From this a point of view

the ambivalent rhetoric takes on added, multilayered meanings and turns Jason into

much more than the “most romantic figure in the novel” (Putzi, “Introduction” xxv).

He embodies the ancient trickster figure, but is still a heroically struggling Mercury

whose disillusionment with life has dwindled his idealist, youthful fire but not erased

all hope. Without glorifying him, then, Stoddard critiques New England, as well as

American society, through him.

[…] he saw a lazy snake coiled upon a rock [Philippa] was about to

step on; he seized and flung it far into the bushes. Rubbing his

hands with grape-leaves, he said: “You are afraid of everything.”

“Yes, I am,” she answered meekly. “How could you take it up?”

“Because it frightened you, and the sooner out of the way the better.

I do not believe you can climb this hill.” […] He caught her up, and

with a few strides was at its top, […]. (Two Men 50)

In the mental image of Jason carrying Philippa uphill, the pendentive of

Mercury leading Psyche upwards to the heavenly sphere in the Villa Farnesina comes

to mind.33

hierarchy that goes with it” (213).

Jason’s subsequent speech underlines not only his eloquence but shows

him to possess a metaphysical-philosophical strain despite his hitherto demonstrated

indifference vis-à-vis the world and the society he inhabits. In fact, from the beginning

he is depicted as lounging about, “brooding” and “musing” (Two Men 65) in the house

and outdoors, all poses which point to the pensive and recumbent Mercury figures

32 The parallels between Jason’s speech and the unfortunate donkey in Ovid’s Fasti are

intriguing indeed: while Mr. Ritchings embarrassedly “looked on the ground and picked up a

twig,” the greatly annoyed Parke “moved his cigar to the other side of his mouth” and

“murmured […] in Theresa’s ear: ‘The old gent is breaking out with a vengeance’” (Two Men

77-78).33 It is an unusual visual representation because in The Golden Ass only Jupiter’s command is

related, not the action itself: “Incontinently after, Jupiter commanded Mercury to bring up

Psyche into the palace of heaven” (283).


favoured by sculptors of the second half of the nineteenth-century (Moog-Grünewald

350). Then again, Jason is shown to be funny and entertaining with “quaint remarks

that forced even Philippa to laugh […]” (Two Men 78).

But his philosophizing also reveals an active side in him that is linked to a deeply

personal relationship with nature in the here and now and which acknowledges

nature’s beauty, as well as its terror. This nature-loving side of his is not shared by the

other family members and propels him as much to the periphery of their circle as his

brooding. It may not be far-fetched to discern in this portrait a humorous wink at the

notoriously famous Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, whose love for nature

was judged by contemporaries by such opposite extremes as heretic paganism or

syncretistic mysticism.34

To Mr. Ritchings the speech is so preposterous that he cries: “You must read the

Gospel with a good deal of imagination” (Two Men 78). Thoughts such as Jason’s

obviously are to the minister the offspring of a fantastic mind bordering on the heretic.

Surprisingly, it is Parke who is most bothered by Jason’s verbal outpour although he

rarely gives heed to his father’s presence let alone his thoughts. On this occasion he

even appears to take it personally. In fact, the speech may be interpreted as a mirror

held up to him, reflecting an image that is all but flattering and that certainly does not

fit his self-image. It shows him stripped of his polished appearance, a purely

hedonistic man set upon sexual satisfaction, possession, and conquest without

scruples or respect for the Other(s)—an aggressive, oversexed Priapus. Such a

creature is indeed “some thing” that “confounds and annihilates” all ethics; such is the

reflection of a man who believes in what he feels, as Jason says; who “does not value

the Creator,” but “thinks of the created” (Two Men 77). Linked to the “fair works” of

Nature by his beauty, he nevertheless is devoid of a soul that is worth saving by Christ.

In his audience the speech provokes a variety of reactions,

since, to stay with Mercury’s trickster image, this is the moment when he tells “the

old story in a way that makes its former clarity collapse into befuddling

contradiction,” which renders “its design […] perspectival and temporal, not eternal”

(Hyde 214)—the “old story” here being the clear distinction between earth and sky, as

well as humankind’s eternal struggle for salvation. The moment is typical of what

Lewis Hyde has described as the “double motion” of Mercury’s

“enchanting/disenchanting power” (Hyde 208): Jason’s words enchant and disenchant

his listeners or at least those listeners who are already in the cultural centre that he

wants to enter—he enchants Theresa; disenchants Mr. Ritchings and Parke; neither

enchants nor disenchants Philippa who, an outsider herself, does not perceive a

crossing of boundaries.

34 By 1865, Thoreau had been dead for three years. In October 1854 Stoddard had reviewed

Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods. Witty and insightful, Stoddard’s short review is a

mixture of mockery and curiosity (Buell and Zagarell 313-14). Also, the Stoddards were

personally acquainted with Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom Thoreau had made the vegetable

patch in the garden of the Old Manse in Concord. It was Hawthorne who helped Richard

Stoddard to obtain a position in the U.S. Custom House in New York in 1853 (Matlack 280ff).


Thus, he causes “suffering, and uncertainty” (Two Men 77)—surely an annoying

mirror image.

At this point the question arises whether this is to be understood as an authorial

judgment, or whether this is one of the passages in which Stoddard “refuses to

privilege any single point of view” (Putzi, “Introduction xxxi) so that it does not even

become clear where her sympathies lie. What complicates matters is the fact that a

twenty-first century audience is positively biased toward the trickster. But the status

of both deities, Mercury and Priapus, conflicts with their often capricious and ungodly

actions. In fact, in the statues of Priapus, or the ithyphallic stone pillars (the herms)

that mark boundaries, the clear distinctions between Hermes/Mercury and Priapus

blur so that suddenly Mercury takes on an image that is much less spiritual and

disinterested than his nineteenth-century image makes him appear. 35

However, that Stoddard meant to represent and judge Parke negatively as “a

threatening male” (Richlin 58) becomes evident in her repeated emphasis “that

danger emanated from Parke’s behavior” (Two Men 137; emphasis in the original).

Also, an

impersonation of Priapus does not necessarily reduce him to a

hyperphallic-oppressive male, but may present an occasion to show the “propensity

for self-critique” (Uden 5), which was an essential generic element of the classical

Priapic form.

36

In contrast Jason is depicted to curb and prune the outgrowth of his natural, “savage

instincts” which “made him a man” (Two Men 89; emphasis in the original) to protect

Philippa rather than his “conjugal honor” (Two Men 91). Hence, Stoddard’s

representation of Priapic masculinity does by no means match the evaluation of

antiquity of most Americans at the time, who, according to Sarah Annes Brown,

associated “ancient Greek culture […] with wholesome and manly vigour” (438).37

Theresa herself is enchanted and thinks Jason “a genius” (Two Men 78). With

her analytical mind and her “subtle instinct” she “understood Jason’s meaning” (Two

Indeed, Stoddard criticizes not only Parke, the individual, but society’s phallocentric

cult and high esteem of virile strength which endorses and perpetuates aggressiveness

and conquest. Putzi maintains that “Parke would never consider pressing a white

woman into sexual activity” (“Introduction” xliii). But in a society such as this, there

is no need for Parke to “press” a woman into submission, he is already worshipped

and revered. Theresa’s struggle for a companionate partnership is therefore all the

more noteworthy.

35 Cf. Kerényi 23.36 See also Two Men 78; 136.37 It is known that around 1891 a seventeenth-century statue of Priapus arrived in Morristown,

New Jersey. The New York banker Luther Kountze purchased the pair of marble statues

Priapus and Flora (1616) by Pietro Bernini from the gardens of the Villa Borghese and had

them transported to his estate (Sloane 551). Yet, nothing has been published that illuminates

the significance or function that these statues had for Kountze and his circle. Today, the two

statues are on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art


Men 77). Stoddard places this sentence right after the disenchanted reactions of Mr.

Ritchings and Parke, which seems to imply that Theresa grasps the different layers of

meaning. But it is also likely that, like the others, she refers his words to her own

situation, which renews her ambivalence to Parke. In fact, her doubts re-surface at the

end of the picnic:

“Shall I ever again have so beautiful an hour as this, Parke? […]”

She clasped the trunk of a pine, and signed to him to go on.

“I’ll stay here forever, if you say so.”

“You would not.” (Two Men 78)

Thus, the chapter ends on a note of doubt. If, for Theresa, the stay on the “Isle of

Love” has not dissolved her ambivalent feelings about Parke, Jason’s “breaking out

with a vengeance” (Two Men 78) has turned him in her eyes into an unassailable

“genius.” While in Ovid’s Fasti the donkey is sacrificed, in Two Men Jason’s

unexpected loquaciousness makes him more visible. Jason’s/Mercury’s interruption

may not have secured him an accepted place in the inner circle yet, but it has become

clear that he can cross boundaries and dissolve clear distinctions if he wishes to. If he

has puzzled the readers, he shows himself to be a multi-faced personality to be

reckoned with in the unfolding events.

One of the almost forgotten aspects of Mercury as the god of trade is consistently

emphasized in Jason throughout the novel: he is shown to be particularly apt at

managing and consolidating the Parke finances and property. Yet his way into the

Parke fortune has less to do with honesty and good stewardship than with Jason’s

“bewitch[ing]” (Two Men 5) qualities, as well as his intelligent use of the connections

that his marriage brings him. These are altogether skills that do credit to the ancient

god’s position in the “intermediate realm […] between the rigid boundaries of ‘mine

and yours’” (Kerényi 44). Indeed, Jason’s marriage with Sarah Parke signals the

arrival of a new order and hierarchy within the familial and national “house.” So does

Parke’s exile and “expansion” to Southern America outside of the home. Jason’s

successful invasion of the New England aristocracy is crucial to what Hyde considers

an essential trickster quality, namely the “reapportionment and the cancellation (or

remaking) of hierarchy” (215). Hyde also points to the connection between the

function of Hermes as the god of lottery and the Greek political system as an

“expression of the democratic principle of the absolute equality of all citizens” (215).

Notwithstanding the exaggerated optimism in the egalitarian aspects of democracy in

ancient Greece, I consider this an important link concerning the ending of Stoddard’s

Two Men. By establishing Jason together with a female outsider in the ancestral home,

Stoddard challenges the old American social order and pictures a hitherto unknown

democratic constellation.


2.4. The Ambiguous Future of Mercury and the American Sphinx

As Putzi convincingly argues, Philippa as the American Sphinx “(re)presents the

riddle of American identity” (“The ‘American Sphinx’” 189) in familial and national

terms. While Philippa is allowed to become a member of the family (and country) by

defining her identity according to the system of patrilineality, such membership is

denied to the Lang sisters who are defined by American culture and society according

to a matrilineal system even though Philippa, Charlotte, and Clarice are all white and

of ambiguous racial origins.

It must be added that the riddle of the American Sphinx contains two further

components. First, and most obviously, Stoddard’s American Sphinx lampoons the

nineteenth-century male version of the Sphinx as the seductive vamp and femme

fatale against whose danger and fatal attraction man had to steel himself.38 A famous

example of this confrontation had been all the talk of the Salon at Paris a year before

the publication of Two Men: Gustave Moreau’s painting Œdipus and the Sphinx

(1864). An alternative version to his rival Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s earlier

Oedipus Explaining the Enigma of the Sphinx (1808-1827), Moreau chooses the

moment when Oedipus and the Sphinx are interlocked in battle. His “bejewelled and

eroticised” (Cook 613) Sphinx charges at an ascetic, saint-like Oedipus.39 Stoddard

mingles the Egyptian myth40 with a scene that at first parallels, but then transforms

Ingres’s Oedipus who, with his left foot firmly placed upon a rock and supported by

his lances, inquisitively peers at the Sphinx in front of him:

38 The subject of the Sphinx as the mysterious temptress begins to take hold of the artistic

imagination in the early nineteenth-century with such works as Ingres’s Oedipus Explaining

the Enigma of the Sphinx (1808-1827), or Heinrich Heine’s poem “The Sphinx” (1839). The

Sphinx also becomes a popular subject in the representation of the battle of the sexes in

painting, literature, and poetry (Moog-Grünwald 505; Demisch 191-96).39 The painting is also seen to reflect Moreau’s statement that art was to be an expression of the

soul in the controversy of archaism vs. mimetic art. Moreau considered mere imitation a

prostitution of contemporary art to the tastes of the new, wealthy French middle-classes, a

debasement he saw mirrored in Ingres’s turn away from history paintings towards portrait

painting and paintings of the female nude (Cook 609-15; Allan n.p.). 40 In her depiction of the setting with Philippa as the Sphinx enthroned on top of the hill,

Stoddard draws upon the Egyptian associations of the Sphinx with (1) Re, the god of the sun,

which is often shown as a ring of light behind or above the Sphinx’s head; and (2) Horus and

his birthplace, the “waters of chaos” (Suhr 102): “[Parke] followed her slowly, till he saw her

seated among the trees on the top of the hill. A line of crimson light gleamed in the west—the

arc of sunset; overhead the purple clouds of November rolled together and drew apart in the

tumult of the sea-wind, which tossed them as it tossed the waves whose deep moan rose and

fell round him as if baffled by the height he had reached” (Two Men 206). Thus,

Philippa’s—the Sphinx’s—seat resembles the “primeval hill” (Suhr 102) which, according to

Egyptian mythology, marks a place of rebirth and resurrection.


Climbing the rock against which she rested, he peered through the

bare boughs rattling over her head, and continued: ‘Oh yes, the high

bank at the south end of Prince Island is illuminated with the rays of

the sun that has left us, and the outlet next it looks like a dark tunnel.

[…]’ And he carelessly dropped down beside her. (Two Men 207)

With this last sentence, Stoddard bathetically undercuts the tension of the

conventional confrontation between Oedipus and the Sphinx, only to return to it a few

paragraphs later. She then facetiously turns the scene upon its head when Parke

“solves” the riddle of the Sphinx as it finally dawns on him that Philippa has been in

love with him all along:

The sea roared in her ears, the wind tossed her hair across her eyes;

she threw back her head madly, and he caught the knowledge in her

face which struck him like lightning, and she rolled over at his feet

as if she were stone dead.

“Why, she loves me!” he said, in a loud, stupefied voice, looking

down upon her. “My God, what is there in me to love?” […]

“I want you,” she said.

[…]

“I shall always love you, […] because you are so beautiful.” (Two

Men 208-210)

Parke, the homme fatale and beautiful dream of Philippa, is shown to be appalled

by Philippa’s outward appearance throughout the novel.41

The second component of the riddle of the American Sphinx is less comical and

returns to the “Genius of the Republic” (Two Men 61), stressing its democracy and

economy. Because of the double standard concerning the formation of national

identity, Philippa inherits her father’s money and property, which foreshadows the

arrival of another new class and type of American citizens: the property-holding

In Stoddard’s battle of the

sexes, a Sphinx obsessed with the man before her is vanquished, while the surprised

Parke desperately and unheroically tries to revive her: “He shook her, rubbed her

hands, pinched her cheeks, and at last she opened her eyes” (Two Men 208). Ironically,

this is a sort of rebirth for Philippa whose obsession with the “beautiful” Parke is

revealed to be nothing but a castle in the air.

41 Clearly, Philippa’s beauty lies in the eye of the beholder: Sarah does not think she “could […]

be called beautiful” (Two Men 59); Parke considers her “hideous” as the American Sphinx

(Two Men 61); whereas Mr. Ritchings sees in her “the delicate, flaming leaves of some

tropical flower” and “a tropical bird” (Two Men 50); Jason compares Philippa several times to

a strange, exotic creatures, e.g., a “cockatrice,” a “tiger-lily,” and as the American Sphinx “the

Genius of the Republic” (Two Men 46; 60; 61).


woman who increasingly gains the rights to own and manage her possessions.42 As

Two Men veers towards its conclusion, Jason, who so far has not been averse to

money matters and, Mercury-like, brought consolidation and prosperity, decides to no

longer be tied down by “the Parke property—which, like a beast, has welked [sic] and

waved its horns before all the family” (Two Men 253). The metaphor of the fiendish

beast of money alludes to a peculiarly American “madness” 43 that Jason sees

embodied in his own son Parke, as well as in Philippa’s father, Osmond Luce:

[…] I desire you to take every dollar out of my hands; the old

uncertainties connected with the wanderings of the family shall not

be renewed in my case. I must be as free of you as you are of me.

Perhaps for your own sake it is best that you should go; your

prestige is gone. I must tell you, however, that Osmond’s hands are

by no means clean; the men of your race have single vices, and run

them hard. (Two Men 203)

Jason’s statement, although a powerful indictment of the interconnections

between the American economy, phallocentrism, hegemony, and slavery, is too

utopian to be a practical solution. Not surprisingly, Jason’s leave from the Parke

estate is only temporary, and he eventually returns to stay and live with Philippa in

the family home. But whoever takes this ending for a happy ending misses Stoddard’s

facetious humour. Those readers attentive to Stoddard’s characteristic

“de/construction of happy endings” (Opfermann and Roth xxv) have rightly pointed

out the problematic conclusions of Two Men—is the union of Jason and Philippa not

an entrapment rather than a happy ending? What about their semi-incestuous

relationship? And why end the novel with Parke in Venezuela?

I want to look at the ambiguities of the ending from a slightly different angle by

returning to the re-appearance of the Neoplatonic image of Mercury and the Sphinx.

Announcing a new democratic order in the American house or nation, the unlikely

pair implies a humorous debunking of the old, false gods of race, class, gender, and

trade, at the same time that it implies a deadly serious comment on the present

dilemmas that this combination entails. For one thing, a trickster figure like Mercury,

once inside the house will agree “to play by the rules” (Hyde 221) and eventually be

domesticated unless the house is destroyed, a fate which does not appear to disturb

Jason or Philippa in the least: “‘I hope nobody will take the trouble to unroof us if it

happens,’ said Jason. ‘Be sure to let us alone, Mrs. Rogers,’ Philippa added” (Two

Men 226-27). Such an ending would mean that both return to their roles as outsiders

and re-assume their ancient superhuman presence and mythological functions at the

threshold of death and in sepulchral monuments: Philippa, the American Sphinx, as a

42 Cf. Linda Kerber 9-39. 43 Cf. Shakespeare’s King Lear: “[…] He had a thousand noses, / Horns whelked and waved

like the enraged sea. / It was some fiend. […]” (4.6, 70-73).


guardian at the threshold of death; and the Mercurian/Hermetic Jason as a

psychopomp who leads the souls into the afterlife—which may be either an ascent to

the gods or a descent into the underworld.

If there is no destruction, the Sphinx’s other function as a safeguard of thresholds

comes into play to protect the entrance to power or rulership.44

3. Conclusion

Hyde reminds us that

if the trickster is domesticated, he still lives “in a world he has altered” (223). As we

have seen, the altered world includes uncomfortable compromises, not the least of

which is the American trade’s continued questionable sources through imperialist

expansionism and exploitation in spite of the Emancipation Proclamation; as well as

the replacement of the former American aristocracy through a new middle class,

including women and mixed-race citizens. Stoddard emblematizes the awkwardness

of these compromises in the image of Mercury and the Sphinx enshrined in a New

England home. No matter what fate awaits, Stoddard’s revival of Raphael’s

“grottesche” combination is a powerful statement concerning these far-reaching and

agitating changes. The fact that they were more dreaded than desired becomes clear in

Parke’s final words when, listening to Osmond’s speculation concerning a union

between Philippa and Jason, he exclaims: “‘Never! It is impossible’” (Two Men 261).

Underlying her major protagonists with such diverse mythological figures as the

Sphinx, Mercury, and Priapus, in Two Men Stoddard represents the increasingly

complicated encounter between the sexes. In her nineteenth-century re-narration of

the amorous adventures of Parke Auster, the New England Priapus, Stoddard wrestles

with gender as well as racial and national conflicts. Blending her female figures’

mythological implications with her floral grotesques, Stoddard’s women protagonists

gain individualistic as well as idiosyncratic features. Full players and powers to be

reckoned with in the eternal battle of the sexes, these women are no superhuman

female models or sentimental heroines; nor does Stoddard spare them from—at

times—facetious laughter. Likewise, Parke/Priapus and Jason/Mercury are shown in

all their ambiguities, often veering dangerously close to the vertiginous abyss of their

own desires. Stoddard’s America is a far cry from the Herculean image of a glorious

Republican nation. With its crossbred figures of ancient and Neoplatonic myth,

Victorian flower imagery, and a multiracial cast, all placed in a New England setting,

Two Men fascinates but also puzzles the reader exceedingly.

In her reception and adaptation of myth, Stoddard not only contributes to the

material and mental culture of nineteenth-century America through her unusual hybrid

figures whose stoic attempts to brave the tides of an unpredictable fate evince as

much anxiety as courage, but she also makes a significant contribution to the incipient

literary debate of realism. This becomes evident in Stoddard’s struggle with the

mental images on the one hand, and for authorial self-assertion on the other, as well as

44 Cf. Demisch 83ff and 221; Suhr 97-111.


Philippa’s/the American Sphinx’s distinction between “the real” and “the ideal.”45

Sandra A. Zagarell notes that in Two Men Stoddard achieves but an “uneasy

compromise” between stark regionalism and English melodrama and that she “is less

formally creative” (27) than in her first novel The Morgesons. Interestingly, Stoddard

herself thematizes the unevenness that Zagarell criticizes. One of her revisions in the

second edition from 1888 underlines the expression of incongruity in style, genre, and

Jane Eyre as

a “literal novel” (Two Men 49), the usually imperturbable, even taciturn Philippa

reacts with unexpected eloquence, and a conversation develops between the two:

“Literal! Charlotte Bronte […] threw a glamour over the burnt

porridge even, at the Lowood school, and the seed-cake which Jane

shared with Helen Burns. Did red and white furniture ever look

anywhere else as it did at ‘Thornfield’? […] Genius casts its

glamour over ordinary things: we who have none say there is a

discrepancy between the real and the ideal.”46

“But life must be illustrated.”

“It cannot be. The text ruins the attempt.”

“Does not passion illustrate it?”

“I do not know.”

“Somebody says ‘Nothing is so practical as the ideal, which is ever

at hand to uphold and better the real,’ and I believe it.” (Two Men

74)

Philippa’s analogy between writing and furnishing concerning Brontë’s illusory

cover over the ordinary “red and white furniture” at Thornfield Hall implies an

aestheticized surface that hides the more gruesome, unpleasant aspects of life as a

smooth skin covers the mortal (red) flesh and (white) bones of a human body. But

where Philippa looks through the artificiality of the seemingly ideal surface texture

and is convinced of the utter futility of a writer’s attempt at improving or

embellishing reality, Mr. Ritchings valorises and insists upon a writer’s obligation to

improve and aestheticize in the process of writing, in particular, when “passion” is

45 It is noteworthy that Stoddard’s third and last novel, Temple House (1867), is prefaced by a

number of quotes that refer to the tropes of life, feeling, individual desires, naturalism, and

nature. It seems as if Stoddard’s interest indeed shifts towards “the real.” But in spite of the

prefatory stress on life and experience, Temple House still contains the tension between

Stoddard’s general commitment to an uncomfortable truth on the one hand, and more pleasing,

illustrative imagery on the other. This becomes obvious in the figure of Sebastian, whose

accident and friendship with Argues Gates plays on the homoerotic iconography of St.

Sebastian. 46 Cf. footnote 27, p. 265. In the first published version it reads: “Genius describes ordinary life

for us, and then we suffer in reality the discrepancy of its words” (Two Men 74).


involved. The dialogue ends as they arrive at their destination, and the apparent

contrast remains unresolved.

Considering Stoddard’s terse style, her often unpleasant characters and their

jarring voices, it is tempting to accept Philippa’s viewpoint as Stoddard’s and interpret

it as the tendency towards a realistic and life-like portrayal of her fictitious

“furniture,” including her characters. In a letter to James Russell Lowell in 1860,

Stoddard self-confidently asserts the “coarseness” that accompanies such a style of

writing: “Do I disturb your artistic sense by my want of refinement? I must own that I

am coarse by nature. At times I have an overwhelming perception of the back side of

truth” (qtd. in Putzi, “Introduction” xi). But as late as 1888, Stoddard refutes the label

of realist writer, emphasizing in a letter to her friend Edmund Clarence Stedman: “I

am not realistic—I am romantic, the very bareness and simplicity of my work is a trap

for its romance” (qtd. in Buell and Zagarell xxii).47 Although an author’s affirmation

of what (s)he is or is not, must always be treated very cautiously, the fact that we do

have to take Stoddard’s scepticism of realist art seriously becomes perhaps most

obvious in an early comment on photography in The Alta California from May 3,

1857: “Photographs are the ugliest invention of the day. […] There are no fine shades.

[…] This is what I complain of—the truth of the pictures. Beauty is ideal; we want an

artist to render its expression not to give us an ugly fact” (qtd. in Putzi, “Introduction”

xxiv). On the one hand, these comments show Stoddard’s involvement in the

stylistic-aesthetic concerns and debates of her times, particularly in the controversy

about idealism versus realism and naturalism. On the other hand, the distinction of

these categories has generally been questioned as to its usefulness when dealing with

Stoddard, as well as other American “realist” writers.48

47 By the 1870s William Dean Howells, as the editor of Harper’s Monthly, had become the

public voice that articulated and spread the principles of literary realism in America. To

measure the “realist” quality of fiction he articulated his famous questions concerning the

plausibility and truthfulness of “the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of

actual men and women” (49) in the context of the characters’ socio-historical circumstances.

Howells’s theoretical guidelines were published in Criticism and Fiction (1891), a collection

of his critical essays from the “Editor’s Study.” For Howells, the realist writer appealed to the

rational, intellectual faculties of the reading public while also emphasizing literature’s moral

and improving qualities. At its best, Howells believed, literature was constantly evolving

progressively. Cf. Donald Pizer, Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American

Literature; and Francis Albert Berces 190-202.

What I find most intriguing is

48 American scholar Winfried Fluck argues that American realism is not the radical paradigm

change as which it has been pictured, but a search for how to represent a changed perception

of reality (19), as well as a conscious re-definition of the function of fiction (24ff). Opfermann

and Roth likewise underline that the “emphasis on difference has obscured the continuities

between romantic and realist fiction which mark Stoddard’s writing” (xviii). And Putzi

maintains that “it is impossible (and indeed unproductive) to reduce her body of work to any

single literary movement or style” because Stoddard “craft[ed] a different kind of narrative


the fact that in Two Men the discussion is suspended. Apparently, Stoddard is more

interested in representing rather than overcoming the “discrepancy” or uneven

coexistence of “the ordinary” and “the glamorous.” It may even be said that Stoddard

deliberately and simultaneously experiments with “two ‘realities’” (Læssøe 200), a

stylistic form that anticipates twentieth-century modernism in literature and the arts.

Revealing an acute awareness of the tensions inherent in the general process of

writing, Stoddard’s revival of ancient myth and its imagery reveals the abysses of

human desire and the pitfalls of life beneath the glamorous surface texture without,

however, eliminating passion or hope—in short, pathos.

WORKS CITED

Allan, Scott C. “Interrogating Gustave Moreau’s Sphinx: Myth as Artistic Metaphor in

the 1864 Salon.” 19th-Century Art WorldWide 7.1 (2008): n. pag. Web. 5 August

2010.

Apuleius. The Golden Ass. Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius. Trans.

William Adlington. 1566. Rev. Stephen Gaselee. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,

1965.

Berces, Francis Albert. “Mimesis, Morality, and The Rise of Silas Lapham.” American

Quarterly 22.2 (1970): 190-202.

Bing, Gertrud. “Aby Warburg.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28

(1965): 299-313.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed.

Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Brown, Sarah Annes. “‘Hail Muse! Et cetera’: Greek Myth in English and American

Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology. Ed. Roger D.

Woodard. New York: Cambridge UP, 2008. 425-452.

Brush, Kathryn. “Aby Warburg and the Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht.”

Woodfield 65-92.

Buell, Lawrence, and Sandra A. Zagarell. “Biographical and Critical Introduction.”

The Morgesons and Other Writings, Published and Unpublished by Elizabeth

Stoddard. Eds. Buell and Zagarell. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1984.

xi-xxv.

Buschendorf, Bernhard. “Zur Begründung der Kulturwissenschaft. Der Symbolbegriff

bei Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Aby Warburg und Edgar Wind.” Edgar Wind:

Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1998. 227-248.

Cook, Peter. “Gustave Moreau’s ‘Œdious and the Sphinx’: Archaism, Temptation and

the Nude at the Salon of 1864.” The Burlington Magazine 146.1218 (2004):

609-615.

fiction” (“Introduction” xii).


Demisch, Heinz. Die Sphinx. Geschichte ihrer Dartsellung von den Anfängen bis zur

Gegenwart. Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1977.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Foreword. Knowledge: Movement.” Aby Warburg and the

Image in Motion. Philippe-Alain Michaud. Trans. Sophie Hawkins. New York:

Zone Books, 2004. 7-19.

---. “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology.” Oxford Art

Journal 25.1 (2002): 59-70.

Ebeling, Florian. Das Geheimnis des Hermes Trismegistos. Geschichte des

Hermetismus. Munich: Beck, 2005.

Faivre, Antoine. The Eternal Hermes. From Greek God to Alchemical Magus. Trans.

Joscelyn Godwin. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes P, 1995.

Fluck, Winfried. Inszenierte Wirklichkeit. Der amerikanische Realismus. 1865-1900.

Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992.

Fryd, Vivien Green. Art and the Crisis of Marriage. Edward Hopper and Georgia

O’Keeffe. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2003.

Giovani, Regula. “I Believe I Shall Die an Impenetrable Secret”: The Writings of

Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard. Bern et al: Peter Lang, 2003.

Gombrich, Ernst H. “Warburg Centenary Lecture.” Woodfield 33-54.

Graf, Fritz. “Myth in Ovid.” The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Ed. Philip Hardie.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 108-121.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Culture.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Frank

Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.

225-232.

Grissom, Carol A. Zinc Sculpture in America, 1850-1950. Newark: U of Delaware P,

2009.

Günter, Patricia. “Clara Tice Rediscovered: Art and Life of the Queen of Greenwich

Village.” Diss. Goethe U Frankfurt, Germany, 2010.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature. 1882. Whitefish,

MA: Kessinger P, 2005.

Hindermann, Judith. Der Elegische Esel. Apuleius’ Metamorphosen und Ovids Ars

amatoria. Frankfurt et al.: Peter Lang, 2009.

Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays. Eds. Clara Marburg

Kirk and Rudolf Kirk. New York: New York UP, 1959.

Hyde, Lewis. Mischief, Myth, and Art. Trickster Makes this World. New York: North

Point P, 1998.

Kerber, Linda K. “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of

Women’s History.” Journal of American History 75.1 (1988): 9-39.

Kerényi, Karl. Hermes, Guide of Souls. Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1976.

Læssøe, Rolf. “Eduard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe as a Veiled Allegory of

Painting.” Artibus et Historiae 26.51 (2005): 195-220.

Marek, Michaela J. “Raffaels Loggia di Psiche in der Farnesina: Überlegungen zu

Rekonstruktion und Deutung.” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 26 (1984):

257-290.


Matlack, James Hendrickson. “Hawthorne and Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard.” The

New England Quarterly 50.2 (1977): 278-302.

McClure Smith, Robert, and Ellen Weinauer, eds. American Culture, Canons, and the

Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Tuscaloosa and London: The U of Alabama P, 2003.

Moog-Grünewald, Maria, ed. Der Neue Pauly. Supplemente. Vol. 5. Mythenrezeption.

Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2008.

Müller, Hendrik. Liebesbeziehungen in Ovids Metamorphosen und ihr Einfluß auf den

Roman des Apuleius. Göttingen: Hainholz, 1998.

Murgatroyd, Paul. “The Rape Attempts on Lotis and Vesta.” The Classical Quarterly

52.2 (2002): 622-624.

Opfermann, Susanne, and Yvonne Roth, eds. Stories. Elizabeth Stoddard. Boston:

Northeastern UP, 2003.

---. “Introduction.” Stories. Elizabeth Stoddard. ix-xxxi.

Ostrow, Saul. “Aby Warburg.” Woodfield 1-6.

Ovid. Fasti. Ovid in Six Volumes, V. Trans. Sir James George Frazer. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1976.

---. Metamorphoses. Ovid in Six Volumes, IV. Trans. Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1976.

Petrino, Elizabeth Anne. Emily Dickinson and her Contemporaries. Women’s Verse in

America. 1820-1885. Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1998.

Phillips, John Goldsmith. “Carved Stalls of the High Renaissance: A Triumph in

“Grotesque.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 36.1 (1941): 14-23.

Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in Ninteenth-Century American Literature.

Rev. ed. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.

Putzi, Jennifer. “Introduction.” Two Men. Elizabeth Stoddard. Ed. Jennifer Putzi.

Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2008. xi-lv.

---. “The American Sphinx and the Riddle of National Identity in Elizabeth Stoddard’s

Two Men.” McClure Smith and Weinauer 183-201.

Radinovsky, Lisa. “(Un)Natural Attractions? Incest and Miscegenation in Two Men.”

McClure Smith and Weinauer 202-231.

Richlin, Amy. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor.

1983. New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 1992.

Schmarsow, August. “Der Eintritt der Grottesken in die Dekoration der italienischen

Renaissance.” Jahrbuch der königlich preußischen Kunstsammlungen 2 (1881):

131-144.

Scholl, Dorothea. Von den „Grottesken“ zum Grottesken. Die Konstituierung einer

Poetik des Grotesken in der italienischen Renaissance. Münster: LIT Verlag,

2004.

Seaton, Beverly. The Language of Flowers. A History. Charlottesville and London:

UP of Virginia, 1995.

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. Reginald A. Foakes. Walton-on-Thames:

Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1997.

Sloane, Catherine. “Two Statues by Bernini in Morristown, New Jersey.” The Art


Bulletin 56.4 (1974): 551-554.

Stoddard, Elizabeth. “A Study for a Heroine.” Opfermann and Roth 51-64.

---. “Eros and Anteros.” Opfermann and Roth 89-104.

---. “Journal, 1866.” Buell and Zagarell 347-359.

---. Temple House. New York: G.W. Carleton, P, 1867.

---. The Morgesons and Other Writings, Published and Unpublished by Elizabeth

Stoddard. Eds. Buell and Zagarell. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1984.

---. “Tuberoses.” Opfermann and Roth 184-199.

---. Two Men. Ed. Jennifer Putzi. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2008.

Suhr, Elmer G. “The Sphinx.” Folklore 81.2 (1970): 97-111.

Todd, Pamela. Forget-Me-Not. A Floral Treasury. Boston et al.: Bulfinch P, 1993.

Uden, James. “Impersonating Priapus.” American Journal of Philology 128.1 (2007):

1-26.

Wagner, Anne Middleton. Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of

Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P,

1996.

Ward, Bobby J. A Contemplation Upon Flowers. Garden Plants in Myth and

Literature. Portland, Oregon: Timber P, 1999.

Weinrich, Harald. The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays. Seattle: U of

Washington P, 2005.

Wind, Edgar. Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: A Study in Venetian Humanism. Cambridge,

MA: Harvard UP, 1948.

---. “Einleitung.” Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie zum Nachleben der Antike.

Eds. Hans Meier, Richard Newald and Edgar Wind. Leipzig et al.: Teubner,

1934.

---. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. 1958. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968.

---. The Eloquence of Symbols. Studies in Humanist Art. 1983. Ed. Jaynie Anderson.

Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993.

Woodfield, Richard, ed. Art History as Cultural History. Warburg’s Projects.

Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001.

Zagarell, Sandra A. “Biographical Foreword. Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard

(1823-1902).” McClure Smith and Weinauer 21-34.

ABSTRACT

Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard’s novel Two Men (1865), published at the close of the

Civil War, has gained only moderate attention by scholars so far. Among those who

have examined the novel, only Jennifer Putzi deals with the phenomenon of the

“American Sphinx,” which she convincingly puts into context of the pressing

questions as to the definition of national identity at this crucial time in U.S. history.

Taking its cue from Aby Warburg’s cultural work concerning the “revival of


antiquity” and his “theory of the polarity of the symbol,” this article further explores

the mythology and mythography that resurfaces in the discontinuities and

discrepancies of Stoddard’s novel. Next to the Sphinx there resurface the

mythological figures of Hermes/Mercury and Priapus. Partly modelled after Ovid’s

classical text Fasti, Stoddard relates the story of the Priapic Parke as opposed to the

Mercurian Jason whose qualities as the ancient trickster god subtly undermine the old

order. Reviving the classical “grottesche” by exploiting the contemporary Victorian

flower language and imagery, Stoddard transforms Priapus’s classical chase of Lotis

and Vesta into a confrontation between the sexes that introduces the female

protagonists as equal (sexual) players. At the same time, Stoddard’s adaptation of

classical myth brings to the fore the uncertainties that these changes of the old order

entail, concluding the novel with the ambiguous image of Mercury and the Sphinx

either enshrined, or entombed, in the New England ancestral home.

Keywords: Elizabeth Stoddard, nineteenth-century women’s writing,

myth and its adaptation, iconography

1865

Jennifer Putzi Sphinx

Aby Warburg

Sphinx Hermes Mercury Priapus

Ovid

Priapus Lotis Vesta

Hermes Sphinx

Michaela Keck received her doctorate degree in American Studies at Goethe University in

Frankfurt Germany. At present, she is an instructor at the English and American Studies


Institute at Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg, Germany. From 2006-2009 she has

been teaching as an assistant professor at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan. She is

the author of Walking in the Wilderness. The Peripatetic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century

American Literature and Painting (Winter Verlag, 2006) and has published a number of

articles on nineteenth-century American literature and culture.

Mythology and Mythography in Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard's Two Men

Documents

Transcript of Mythology and Mythography in Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard's Two Men