Romantic tragedy is another staple in Southern Gothic tales and literature. Visitors to this Bonaventure grave of Corinne Elliot Lawton are eager to believe the lurid tour guide tales of how she lived and died. Such guides theatrically proclaim that Corrine was madly in love with a man “below her station,” and that her parents (her father was a Confederate General) would not approve of their relationship. They say that the General preferred an arranged marriage. They claim that Corinne died by her own hand in 1887, “throwing herself into a river” just beyond this cemetery on the night before her arranged wedding. She is buried under this contemplative sculpture of herself, created by Italian artist Benedetto Civiletti. Visitors to Bonaventure enjoy believing in such romantic fantasies, eagerly accepting them and repeating them to others as fact. I have researched this story, and learned that what our tour guide told us about Corrine Elliot Lawton’s death is pure Southern Gothic fiction, with no basis in fact. Corrine’s mother happened to keep a diary, preserved by the Georgia Historical Society. There is no mention of any arranged marriage or suicide in this diary. The diary does mention that Corrine fell ill just days before her death. Pneumonia? Yellow Fever? The disease is not known, but it was illness that took Corrine Elliot Lawton’s life, not suicide.

I photographed the tomb of Corrine Lawton here as an abstraction. I use monochromatic sepia tonality here, similar to images of this era. By removing color, I leave more to the viewer’s imagination. I include the adjoining tree branches at left to rhythmically echo the curves of the folds in the statue’s garment, as well as to obscure distracting verbal information on the grave marker. The figure symbolizes a young Victorian woman wondering why her life has ended so soon. Victorian grave monuments are highly romanticized versions of life, more symbolic than real. This talented sculptor creates myth out of marble. Corrine Elliot Lawton’s life remains the stuff of tour-guide mythology nearly 140 years after her burial below this statue.