Keeping Up Appearances: A Lacanian Perspective on American Mythmaking in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ 'The Puritan' (1886)

For Jacques Lacan, “psychoanalysis is the discipline which has reestablished the bridge linking modern man to the ancient myths.” This bridge towards myth that inevitably runs through the unconscious lays bare the scaffolding of culture. Famously, for Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, operating in one part through chains of signifiers which comprise a register of experience called the Symbolic. This Symbolic order, in relation to its two counterparts the Imaginary and the Real, is anchored by a fundamental signifier, the Symbolic Father, also called the Name-of-the-Father. Not necessarily a literal father, the Name-of-the-Father represents the lawgiving and morally punitive function that confers identity and legitimacy to the subject, in a clinical sense; culturally, it represents the guarantor of the laws, rules, and authority that comprise society. It imposes meaning. If repressed, meaning collapses, and the subject falls back into the Imaginary order, the order of fantasy.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ towering bronze, 'The Puritan,' first unveiled in Springfield, Massachusetts on Thanksgiving Day in 1887, appears at first to exemplify the Name-of-the-Father as a dramatic consolidation of shared history and moral authority in an age of surfeited civic virtue. This is, however, only smoke and mirrors, a taste of the Lacanian Imaginary. In its embodiment of imagined Puritan virtue, it hides a dissonance between Puritanism, the artist, and an evolving nation struggling to define itself in its Gilded Age. Any meaningful study on The Puritan, particularly one dependent upon historical and social context, is indebted art historian Erika Doss. Her painstaking work in “Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s The Puritan: Founders’ Statues, Indian Wars, Contested Public Spaces, and Anger’s Memory in Springfield, Massachusetts” (2012) is a key interlocutor that provides rather crucial social and cultural contexts surrounding the statue. Where Doss presents a comprehensive socio-political account, this paper approaches The Puritan from a distinctly psychoanalytic perspective, expanding her insights through Lacanian theory.

In doing so, I argue that, in the wake of cultural uncertainty following the American Civil War, Saint-Gaudens’ The Puritan (1886) functions as a compensatory and contradictory fantasy of moral authority; as a foreboding yet caricatural paternal archetype, it fails as a Lacanian signifier of the Symbolic Father, exposing the fragility and ultimately the neurosis of Gilded Age myth-making. Upon interrogation of The Puritan in the ideological significance of its patronage, its formal contradictions, and finally, its psychic disfigurement through parody, my paper uncovers how civic art does not simply reflect ideology, it actively constructs and performs it as a symptom of a myth-making society.