Carrie Brown Bajnotti's Death in the Monumental Landscape

One romantic reading of the Fountain’s tableau describes it as “Life holds onto the spirit and they are both bound to the earth for eternity––an appropriate memorial for the marriage.”[20] Meanwhile, Loredo Taft, another of Yandell’s former teachers, describes the scene as “confusing, but certain features of the struggling group are fine indeed. There is a back of noble, Amazon-like woman which would do honor to any of our sculptors.”[21] Regardless of the meanings one sees emerge from the scene the use of allegorical depiction is significant in and of itself. Rather than representing Carrie Brown Bajnotti herself, the meaning of her death is presented through a depersonalized allegory that purportedly sought to make a universal statement about marriage, love, death, and/or inevitability. One ought to couple this fact with two others surrounding the Fountain’s inception:  its deployment as a piece for the City Beautiful’s aesthetic, moral, and touristic agenda, and its inscription which speaks of Carrie Brown Bajnotti solely in relation to men (her father and her husband). This pattern of facts makes the memorial legible as a co-opting of Carrie Brown Bajnotti’s death and the dispossession of her identity, which is laid solely in the hands of her husband (the donor), an allegorical scene, and the relation she bore to the men of the city’s eminent Brown family. However, this is not to say that Count Bajnotti’s intentions were necessarily impure; the fact that he commissioned three separate monuments in the wake of her death alone would seem to argue for taking these gestures as mourning. That said, even on this point, there are two more important notes that rightfully complicate one’s perception of the Fountain and its meaning.

First, recalling that Count Bajnotti himself was neither a Providence native nor a long time resident of the city, the fact that he was able to erect three monuments to his Providence-born wife in her home city—a place did seem to have spent meaningful time together in. Accordingly, the bequest of the three monuments is a productive and historicizing act, which intimates a false relation to the city. The monuments reproduce the Brown family as eternally and essentially in and of Providence, despite the fact the memorial’s subject and her husband did not bear such a relation to the city. Second, and relatedly, the Fountain and its sibling memorials confront us with the power of a private citizen to fix something so personal and comparatively irrelevant to the public as his marriage into a central geography of civic life, landscape, and psyche. and psyche. Think, too, of the environmental and economic impact of the fountain’s creation, water usage, upkeep. To have all of this governmental resource cover a private citizen’s wish to memorialize their beloved is a striking image of power indeed.