The Artist of the Beautiful

Peter Hovenden represents regularity, civilization, practicality, and an authoritative disapproval of the fragility that Owen Warland embodies. Owen names him “my evil spirit” accusing Peter of keeping him from doing the creative tasks he feels called to do. Peter views Owen with some contempt, and his sinister influence upon his young apprentice is stronger than Owen would wish.

Peter functions as the voice of society, espousing popular Puritan opinions about artists. In some ways, he is Owen’s mortal and god-like enemy, offering multiple opportunities that test Owen’s faith—having taught the young man the conventions that he is flaunting, he also gives Owen the news that his daughter has married his opposite, Robert Danforth.

When Owen finally succeeds in creating his masterpiece, the butterfly droops and falls on Peter’s finger, which the artist proclaims is a result of “an atmosphere of doubt and mockery” (26) which surrounds Peter. Likewise, when the child destroys the butterfly, Owen notes a look much like Peter’s on the child’s face. Peter, even more than his counterpart, Robert Danforth, helps to illustrate the spiritual conflict that the artist faces in reconciling passion with practicality and matters of faith with mundane reality.

Robert Danforth represents the steady and brute physical strength of a laborer of iron and is a foil for Owen’s frail, creative sensibilities. Robert uses his brawn to make a respectable, conventional, and useful living, and is traditionally masculine.

He has the approval of Peter, who represents society, and wins the heart of Owen’s love interest, Annie: a symbol of the triumph of convention over the artistic.

In delivering to Owen an anvil that the artist wants, Robert compares his “vast hand to the delicate one of Owen” (9) and points out that he puts more strength into one blow that Owen has expended over his entire career. Owen agrees, saying, “Strength is an earthly monster” (9), suggesting that Owen is concerned with loftier, more spiritual things. In creating these contrasts between the two characters, Hawthorne illuminates those dichotomies that exist so clearly here between the spiritual and the mundane.

Though Robert’s attitude toward Owen is not as derisive as Peter’s, he does contribute to the crushing of the artist’s ego with unwittingly, and just as harmful, derogatory words. While he expresses that he is impressed with Owen’s butterfly, he adds “any child may catch a score of them in a summer’s afternoon” (24). It is a “a pretty plaything” (24) when compared with the solid work that Robert does daily. In this way, Robert is not as sinister as Peter; but he is a follower of convention in a way that highlights Owen’s distance from society.

Annie Hovenden is Owen’s love interest and muse, as she’s able to destroy or inspire his work. Annie shows a certain sensitivity to Owen’s nature when she admonishes Peter not to criticize Owen too much while within earshot and says he “has ingenuity enough” (5) to invent a new timekeeper. When she comes into the shop to have Owen fix a thimble, Annie makes an offhand comment about his “putting spirit into machinery” (14), a phrase which makes him wonder if she might, after all, understand and appreciate his work: “You, methinks, would esteem it rightly. You, I know, would hear it with a reference that I must not expect from the harsh, material world” (15). And yet, in the next instant, Annie gives it a small touch that ruins it, and Owen realizes he has deceived himself.

When Annie marries Robert, she chooses conventionality and civilization over the beautiful—and in doing so, has borne a child who is the spitting image of Peter Hovenden in some of his expressions. While she expresses joy at the butterfly that Owen brings her, and wonders multiple times if it is alive, she also harbors “a secret scorn—too secret, perhaps, for her own consciousness, and perceptible only to such intuitive discernment as that of the artist” (25). Perhaps Annie is jealous of Owen’s creation, as she verbally admires her infant and gives him qualities that resemble those that Owen has given the butterfly. She allows her child enough freedom with the butterfly that, in a way, she enables the child to destroy it. Thus, she becomes complicit with the harsh world that Owen shuns.