Maria Cohut
SIMULACRUM:
• an image or representation of someone or something
• an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute
The Oxford Dictionaries Online
CONCEPTUAL TRIANGLE:
Artificial likeness
Pygmalion and the Image
(Galatea)
Roman de la Rose
Bodleian Library, Oxford
French, 15th century
 Medieval theorists […] understood wonder (admiratio) as
cognitive, non-appropriative, perspectival, and particular.
Not merely a physiological response, wonder was a recognition
of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered.
 [W]onder is induced by the beautiful, the horrible, and the
skillfully made, by the bizarre and rare, by that which challenges
or suddenly illuminates our expectations, by the range of
difference, even the order and regularity, found in the world. […]
[M]arveling and astonishment as reactions seem to be triggered
[…] by […] events or phenomena in which ontological and moral
boundaries are crossed, confused, or erased.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonder (pp 3, 21)
 [T]he effect of the uncanny can easily be achieved when one
undertakes to reinterpret some kind of lifeless thing as part of an
organic creature, especially in anthropomorphic terms, in a poetic
or fantastic way.
 The unpleasant impression is well known that readily arises in
many people when they visit collections of wax figures, panopticons
and panoramas. In semi-darkness it is often especially difficult to
distinguish a life-size wax or similar figure from a human person.
Ernst Jentsh, On the Psychology of the Uncanny (pp 224, 222)
 This for two years had been the
Object of his increasing wonder and
adoration.
 Oh! If such a Creature existed,
and existed but for me! Were I
permitted to [...] press with my lips
the treasures of that snowy bosom!
Gracious God, should I then resist
the temptation?
M.G. Lewis, The Monk (pp 40, 41)
Sandro Botticelli,
Madonna with Child
(detail)
[E]ven in its carnal beginnings courtly love had this in common
with Mariolatry, that both Mary and the Lady were focal points
of men's aspirations and desires.
Julia Kristeva, Stabat Mater (pp 140)
What was [Ambrosio’s] amazement at beholding the exact
resemblance of his admired Madona [sic] [in Matilda]? The same
exquisite proportion of features, the same profusion of golden hair,
the same rosy lips, heavenly eyes, and majesty of countenance
adorned Matilda.
M.G. Lewis, The Monk (pp 81)
 It is only when Matilda discards submission that she, as the double
of the Madonna portrait, no longer satisfies.
 When Matilda transgresses the boundary of ideal, feminine
behaviour and becomes masterful, she no longer doubles the
Madonna portrait and consequently no longer mirrors Ambrosio’s
Desires.
Angela Wright, Disruptions of the Idealized Woman (pp 47)
 Deliberately, Lewis compares [Antonia] to a statue, not of the Virgin
nor of a saint but of the pagan goddess of love.
Kate Ferguson Ellis, The Contested Castle (pp 133)
By dying, a beautiful Woman serves as the motive for the creation
of an art work and as its object of representation. As a deanimated
body, she can also become an art object or be compared with one.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body (pp 71)
Clemente Susini, Anatomical Venus (wax, human hair, pearls, rosewood)
ca 1790, Florence
 A Virgin? Oh, dear me, no! I’d soon have
recognized it if it had been a Virgin. It’s an
idol, […] you can tell from the look of her.
She looks at you with those big white eyes
of hers… it’s as if she was staring at you.
You can’t look her in the eyes.
 So we dug and dug, and gradually this
black hand appears, like a dead man’s
hand reaching up out of the ground.
Prosper Mérimée, The Venus of Ille (pp 134, 133)
 Both femininity and death inspire the fear of an ultimate
loss of control, of a disruption of boundaries between self and
Other, of a dissolution of an ordered and hierarchical world.
Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body (pp 182)
 [T]here are two Venuses under my roof. One I found in
the ground like a truffle; the other, descended from the
skies, has just shared out her girdle among us.
 My son, choose [...] the one whom you prefer. […] The
Roman Venus is black, the Catalan Venus is white. The
Roman is cold, the Catalan enflames everything that
approaches her.
Prosper Mérimée, The Venus of Ille (pp 153)