Between It-Narratives and Agalmata: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, (In)Animate Things and the Lifelikeness of Artefacts

“Drowne’s Wooden Image” (1844) and “Feathertop” (1852) have often been read as indebted to the myth of Pygmalion. Yet, multiple deviations from the standard pattern complicate the ways in which readers understand the age-old ambition of artists of achieving lifelikeness, life itself, in their works. The wonders reported in art literature of the Pygmalion ilk turn out to be a commonplace feature in any narrative text employing the ordinary powers of fictive animation. In “Feathertop,” featuring a scarecrow-turned-gentleman thanks to witchcraft, fiction is shown exhibiting its own fictive power to build up a likely candidate for lifelikeness from a cluttered collection of almost anything. “Drowne’s Wooden Image” is a story that reports a story, that of a lady seen promenading in town who would be the flesh-and-blood avatar of her true, pre-existent sculptural self, a ship’s figurehead executed by Drowne. Never endorsing the legendary material nor dismissing it as an instance of arrant fictiveness, the “twice-told tale” leaves readers with mixed feelings about the inscrutable purposes of a storytelling enterprise well suited to the demands of magazine publication, but possibly elusive in its implications.