The Statue

As prevalent as the Duchess's yearning for an escape from her situation is, as chilling then is the knowledge of what became of her strivings. The statue the Duke commissions of Bernini is first encountered by the unnamed first person narrator and the old man and is presented in the nested narrative during the climax of the story. Its appearance is described in evocatively sexual terms:

“[...] a woman in furred robes and spreading fraise, her hand lifted, her face addressed to the tabernacle. There was a strangeness in the sight of that immovable presence locked in prayer before an abandoned shrine. Her face was hidden, and I wondered whether it were grief or gratitude that raised her hands and drew her eyes to the altar, where no living prayer joined her marble invocation. . . . The Duchess’s attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs fluttered her laces and the love-locks escaping from her coif. I saw how admirably the sculptor had caught the poise of her head, the tender slope of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face—it was a frozen horror.”[1]

The “love-locks escaping her coif”, the “attitude of transport” as well as the “poise of her head, the tender slope of her shoulder” suggest a moment of passion and relinquishing of control. Flowing hair or hair escaping its controlled up-dos is often used as a symbol for blossoming female sexuality. Her posture and the tender description of heavenly airs fluttering her laces as well as her “attitude of transport” heavily suggest ecstasy, or rapture; whether of a spiritual of sexual nature is to be read between the lines. Orlando stipulates that the statue’s double meaning is a way to “suggest a slippage—or at least the duke’s suspicion of a slippage—between the woman’s spiritual ecstasy (addressed to her saint) and her sexual abandon (directed at her lover).”[2]

In reading the statue as a two-fold exploration of sexuality, one finds two juxtaposed ideas within the symbolic use of Bernini's fictional work. On the one hand, there is the Duchess's wild bid for liberation and fulfillment represented by the organic details of her appearance described above; on the other, the Duke's (and in a broader sense, society's) punishment for these desires, represented by the marble materiality, the placement of the statue, the twisted face. This confrontation is what makes the statue a key element of the story as it symbolically sums up the main conflict of "The Duchess at Prayer." The Duke and Duchess oppose each other as people and as conceptual representations within the human psyche. It is tragic imagery that statue seems frozen in transport, on the brink of spiritual and sexual ecstasy, and will never be able to dissolve into the pleasures of the mind or flesh. Such is the Duke's punishment for her disobedience and her marital disloyalty. In psychoanalytical terms: if the subconscious feminine were here seeking to repair itself and unite in balance with the masculine, it has failed; in clearer words, it has been damned to eternal pain and never-following dissolution. Worse still, the statue is a piece of art, enshrining the Duchess as a beautiful woman while putting her faults on display for all to see. This is a complete disregard her emotional and spiritual state; at best a cautionary tale for others and at worst an existential humiliation of her as a person. Either way, art as intended for consumption and inspection by others lays the Duchess's intents bare and robs her of any agency or grace she may have retained. Vulnerable and beaten, the Duchess ceases to exist as a woman of flesh and blood; she is likely poisoned by the Duke and, in a sense, is turned to stone.

The statue is in a perpetual state of punishment. As organic as religious and carnal desires are in the Duchess's hair, attire and attitude, as inorganic the marble nature of the statue is. Hard, cold, immobile, "immovable". The Duchess's hands lifted in “grief or gratitude”, her face hidden and “addressed to the tabernacle” and she is kneeling alone before an abandoned altar. This is a clever mockery of her lively spirit and a clever punishment for her supposed infidelity and her aspirations. For all intents and purposes, she herself has been turned to stone; damned to remain where the greatest damage was inflicted upon her heart and soul. Below rests her dead lover, before her is the shrine to a God who will not hear her silent prayers. No wonder then that, in a supernatural twist, her pain seeps through and twists her once beautiful face into a mask of horror.

[1] Wharton 1901, p. 5/6

[2] Orlando 2007, p. 81