The main characters are always important for the reader to understand when reading a story. However, when reading a short allegorical story such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Artist of the Beautiful, it is essential to understand the roles of the characters in order to stand the allegorical meaning of the story.
Owen Warland
The given name Owen means born to nobility, young warrior. The surname Warland makes one think of a land at war. Owen embodies a noble battleground. It is possible that Hawthorne also believes that Owen’s belief is the superior or nobler belief.
Owen is a young watchmaker who was formerly apprenticed to Peter Hovenden. When Hovenden’s eyesight fails him, Owen takes over the shop. Owen is enamored with Peter’s daughter Annie Hovenden but doesn’t reveal his feelings. Owen is a pale, slight man with delicate but strong hands.
Owen has little use for the Practical and spends a great deal of his time trying to create a physical manifestation of his Idea of Beauty. Failures and setbacks cause him to be depressed and to focus on a practical life. Throughout the story, his life and actions are portrayed as the battleground of two opposing religions: the religion of the practical world and the religion of the beautiful and artistic. Owen believes in beauty but the world around him is full of people who find comfort in the practical and Owen is often discouraged by his contact with this world.
Peter Hovenden
The given name Peter means rock. The surname Hovenden is an old place name. Peter is indeed the rock that tries to crush and break Owen and Owen’s dreams and on two occasions, he nearly succeeds.
Peter Hovenden’s ideology is that of the Practical and can be summarized in a comment he makes while walking with his daughter Annie. Hovenden says “it is a good and wholesome thing to depend on main strength and reality, and to earn one’s bread with the bare and brawny arm of a blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a wheel…Did you ever hear of a blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland, yonder?”
His presence maims the spirit of Owen’s butterfly.
Annie Hovenden
The given name Annie means grace or favor. Annie was Owen’s ‘favor’ite and he hoped that she had the grace or talisman to understand his work. However, she does not understand his work because, as the narrator suggests, she doesn’t have the ‘deep intelligence of love.’
Annie marries Robert Danforth and they have a child together.
The butterfly seems to find a sympathetic spirit in Annie.
Robert Danforth
The given name Robert means bright fame. The surname Danforth is an old place name. Brilliance, in a very earthy sense, does seem to be a characteristic of Danforth who is first seen working his shop with the brilliant illumination of his forge lighting him up. The narrator says that the blacksmith deserved to be seen in such “picturesque light and shade, where the bright blaze struggled with the black night, as if each would have snatched his comely strength from the other.”
Robert Danforth is an old schoolmate of Owen Warfield and the opposite of him in every respect. He is a large, dark, brawny man who bulldozes through life using his brute strength. During a conversation with Owen, Owen says that brute strength is an earthly monster and later states that the hard, brute force of Danforth “darkens and confuses the spiritual element within me.”
Yet Danforth is not an altogether bad man. He praises Owen’s butterfly with the best words his limited vocabulary and understanding give him and the butterfly tolerates him.
Baby Danforth
Robert and Annie have a child together. When Owen succeeds in his creation, he brings it to the Danforth home as a gift for the baby. When Owen sees the child it is described as seeming made of the densest material of earth. Owen also notices a strange and frightening resemblance to the child’s grandfather Peter Hovenden.
Owen’s butterfly tolerates the child but alternately brightens and dims while on the child’s hand as if the innocence in the child was mixed with something heartless. The child destroys the butterfly by grabbing it out of the air and crushing it.
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