Anushka Sen

Professor Joan Linton

L630: Work-in-Progress

Art in The Winter’s Tale: Between Stone and Flesh

One of the distinguishing features of The Winter’s Tale is that among Shakespeare’s plays, it

is perhaps the one most strongly identified with a work of art—a work of art belonging to the

theatrical world of the play itself. ‘The statue scene’ in which Hermione appears to change

miraculously from a sculpture to a living being is generally acknowledged as the pivotal

scene in the play, yielding both the climactic point and fruition of the narrative trajectory.

Although no aspect of the play affirms that Hermione was actually transformed into stone,

the impact of this scene depends on the audience’s temporary investment in the statue as a

compelling and unsettling aesthetic object. The spectacular nature of the scene is sparked

from the moment that people refer to Hermione’s statue as an established work of art, and

intensifies when Paulina prepares Leontes for the unveiling, and leads him to the site of

action. The moment of metamorphosis is hailed by music and Paulina’s command, “be stone

no more.” (5.3.99) Here, the materiality of the motionless Hermione reaches a high point of

ambiguity.

In this paper, I wish to explore some of the tensions pertaining to the aesthetic object that

concentrate around the statue and its transformation. I argue that some of aesthetic theory’s

crucial concerns play out in the very uncertainty of the statue’s substance. One overarching

question is where the work of art begins and ends—in this case, art seems to be caught

between containment and dynamism, passivity (in being revealed as a statue) and agency (in

stepping off the pedestal as human), the respective attractions of inanimate and living matter.

I intend to contextualize these questions by touching upon relevant debates in foundational

and contemporary aesthetic theory, such as Heidegger’s concept of the open, and Jeffrey

Jerome Cohen’s discussion of stone and other nonhuman elements. However, before that, I

wish to explore how an aesthetic register permeates the language of the entire play, and in a

way that bears upon the concerns of the statue scene.

“How sometimes nature will betray its folly, / Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime /

To harder bosoms”

A curious feature of the artistic process is its association with two apparently contradictory

sets of qualities that are both fundamental to it. On the one hand, the transformative and

generative aspect of art depends on fluidity, flexibility and dynamism. On the other hand, the

production of a distinct work of art equally relies on the consolidation of aesthetic

components, and on the stability of a well-defined structure. While suppleness is easily drawn

into an equation with creativity and fertility, hardness is frequently imagined as cold and

uncooperative, the embodiment of sterility. However, as mentioned earlier, the completion of

the artistic process necessitates the fixing and putting together of aesthetic elements in their

proper place, and this solidification can also create a sense of security, and further, of a rich

density or texture. Moreover, the quality of flexibility can also be excessive when it threatens

to diffuse the work’s preoccupations, or throw them into disarray. These ambivalences of the

artistic play out in an intriguing way in The Winter’s Tale.

The language of the play is permeated with the rhetoric of softness and hardness, of yielding

and unyielding. This section of the paper will take a closer look at relevant examples to

demonstrate the constantly shifting associations of hardness and softness with different

aesthetic and ethical values. Not only does this irregular network of values feed into the

tension between stone and flesh set up by the statue, it also provides direction for
investigating the boundaries of the work of art. Given the complex range of material values

associated with art, at what point does the ongoing, indeterminate process of artistic

endeavour switch over into the work of art? Moreover, how far is the complete work of art (if

a definition can be settled on) sealed off from its environment? If the artwork is responsive to

external stimulus, does it return to process, or is there room for conceiving of the artwork as

open to fluctuation? This paper’s analysis of the statue scene would suggest that it is not

entirely feasible or even meaningful to separate process from product. Although the play does

expose an anxiety produced by the unstable limits of art, it would appear that the affective

power of the statue’s transformation—both on the characters of the play and (more

speculatively) on the reader or audience—derives from its ability to straddle these various

aesthetic worlds, and throw the onlooker into disarray.

“Thereof to be informed, imprison't not / In ignorant concealment”

In discussing the nature of the work of art, I wish to bring in Heidegger’s concepts of

concealment and unconcealment to talk of the aesthetic as not creation ex nihilo, but an

uncovering, a revelation that could be deliberate and strategic. I am also interested in

exploring Heidegger’s concept of disinhibitors that Agamben takes up in The Open. The

work of art as something that modifies itself in response to its environment cannot be

compared straightforwardly to the animal reacting to disinhibitors, because according to this

notion, animals respond to a predetermined stimulus with a specific function. The same

cannot be said for a work of art. However, the idea of the nonhuman bearing vital,

transformative connections with its environment remains significant and might be worth

exploring specifically in the case of the artwork. [Scope for discussing Bruno Latour here?]

In connection to that, one might ask if the change in the work occurs through use or not, also
raising the question of equipmentality. [Is it possible to discuss Kant’s idea of potentiality in

this context?]

The Enchantment of Stone

In Stone, Cohen turns his attention mostly to medieval texts, in which a stratified,

anthropocentric worldview was being challenged at odd moments by thinkers who,

confronted with the vitality and layered histories of stone, found themselves unable to

classify it as lifeless. It is interesting that despite referring to Shakespeare thrice, Cohen does

not for once mention A Winter’s Tale. There are many possible reasons for this—for one,

Cohen explicitly states that he is not interested in stone as “as a malleable substance that can

be shaped into desirable forms so much as stone as active partner in the shaping of worlds.”

(Cohen 14) Cohen is attracted to stone in its uncut state, as it belongs to geological churnings

and imprints, free from the anthropocentric ends of sculpture. Yet, it is probable that

Hermione was never actually stone, and hence her performance as a statue does not rest upon

the sculptor’s drive to manipulate a difficult substance for the purpose of showcasing human

skill and form. At the same time, the statue also lacks the actual opacity and obstinacy of

stone. What theory of the nonhuman could then account for the space of ambiguity opened up

in the moment where the statue appears to be real, but hasn’t yet come to life?

Other Directions

If the statue forms a primary pole of the play’s aesthetic compass, another is the floral world

culled and ordered by Perdita at the shepherd’s hut in Bohemia. While Bohemia also presents

an aesthetic register of disguise and performance through Autolycus, Perdita’s handling of

flowers seems to present another distinct element comparable to stone. Is it worthwhile taking

up this aspect in comparison to the statue? An idea suggested by Prof. Linton, which links the
warmth of Perdita’s world to the frosty edge of Leontes’ tyranny, is to explore how Perdita,

after being severed from Leontes’ world on his own command, gains access to a larger

ecology. Can this be used without straying too far from the framework of the paper?