L. Clarkson Whitelock's lost Aesthete masterpiece A Mad Madonna
commentary by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
Every now & then I lay hands on a book seemingly very obscure but which on the strength of quality should have been well known. I would include in this category A Mad Madonna & Other Stories by L. Clarkson Whitelock (Boston: Joseph Knight, 1895) which I tracked down after seeing an evocative ad for it in the back of some other old book.
The tales gathered with "A Mad Madonna" are dead-center for the Yellow Nineties Aestheticism, including macabre or symbolic storylines intertwined with a fascination for pictorial arts & for the lives of emotionally tortured artists. The title story is about a ghostly manifestation of a famous painting of the Madonna (the tissued frontispiece reproduces the Sisteen Madonna of Raphael). The woman & her child are part super-powerful religious beings, but this is "a" Madonna not "the," as she is also partly the ghost of the woman who sat for the portrait, & partly the spiritual essence of the painting itself -- a marvelously sophisticated ambiguity.
The painting, the tale asserts, had been stolen from Rome & taken into Germany, but the spirit of this Madonna somehow escaped from the frame & wandered lost in the high alps for 300 years. The story opens with her finally finding her way back to Rome searching for a certain "Raffael" whom she will not believe is centuries dead, & whom she hopes will be able to lay her tired ghost. And in a way, it turns out Raffael is indeed still alive, in the person of the failed artist Raffaello, destined to destruction by the very street-beggar everyone calls Mad Madonna.
There are chilling moments to the tale but its main feature is a refined Decadent elegance. I had not yet researched the author when I first read this collection, but as Raphael seems an obsession elsewhere in the book, I suspected Whitelock was someone versed in classical painting.
The collection was dedicated to poet Edmund Clarence Stedman which at once suggested to me that Whitelock had some latterday associations with a lingering American Bohemia that reached back to the Poe-obsessed "Pfaff's Cellar" crowd of 1850s New York, among whom Stedman & Whitman were rare survivors, though Stedman perhaps survived by becoming stodgy. The tales in Whitelock's collection were set in the Netherlands, in Naples, Switzerland, Greece -- so contextually I wasn't sure whether the author was British or American even though I assumed the latter, as that would partially account for Whitelock's obscurity. The 1890s Aesthete movement was something of a "community" & even bibliohistorians will overlook those who were not part of the London & Paris scene.
So much I guessed "about the author" on the basis of these short stories alone, a thin thing to go on to be sure. When I finally got around to a speck of research, I was first of all happily surprised to discover the "L." stood for "Louise." I had not guessed these tales were a woman's, a common failing in the world & one for which I find myself sadly not exempt; it is too often assumed that especially among Aesthetes, women were the Muses, not the creators. And therein another reason for her obscurity today -- women's writings being frequently overlooked -- & any ornamental Aesthete leaning is more easily dismissed as inessential parlor decorating.
Born in 1865 in Baltimore, where she was also educated, she became an accomplished illustrator whose art graces some of her own books (not however A Mad Madonna illustrated with photographs of the European settings). This accounts for the fixation throughout A Mad Madonna for statuary & pictorial arts such as take on symbolic & evanescent meaning as in "From Another Country" wherein poetic perception is shown to recreate wonder even from the banality of a plaster set, & whose explicitely Aesthete painter -- "an American of the new English style" -- is tellingly named Hoffman.
But it did not appear Mrs. Whitelock, whose husband was a Baltimore attorney, personally lived the edgy life associated with the Aesthetes, despite that her influences & sympathies were the same, perhaps also her associations, given her primary reputation as a poet, or her sense of herself as being a Violet Among Lilies as she titled an 1895 volume, which concluded a trilogy of beautifully illustrated poetry books, beginning with her very first book Violet with Eyes of Blue (1876) & placing in the middle The Gathering of the Lilies (1877); these are likely her most-sought & valuable titles but because of the plates of her stunning artwork rather than for the poems. That she may have experienced something of a Bohemian youth is hinted at by her occult novel Shadow of John Wallace (1885) set in an artist's commune of Long Island.
It is marvellous at late middle age to still be finding authors previously unknown to me whose works are sufficient in number that I may begin a new quest. I am now on the look-out for further of her volumes of tales & poems with such titles as Rag Fair & Other Reveries (1877) & How Insight Met Provincialities & Other Stories (1898), among others, including a children's fantasy Flyaway Fairies & Baby Blossoms (1882). The hunt is on!