Image from a c.1500 Netherlandish manuscript depicting the annunciation of the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:26–28). Mary is in a walled garden seated on the ground reading a book with a unicorn placing its front legs and head in her lap (symbol of virginity). Also inside the wall are a tower (Song of Solomon 7:4), an altar, and a fleece (Judges 6:36–40) that is illuminated with a ray of light descending from a cloud. Outside the wall behind Mary is a burning bush (Exodus 3:2) and in the foreground the angel Gabriel blowing a horn and being led by two hounds on leashes. The image is framed by botanical drawings.
17 February 2021
The ivory tower is a metaphor for a place where one can cut oneself off from the affairs of the world, a place of solitary, often mental pursuits. Today, it’s most commonly used as a negative reference to academia, but it can also be applied to poets, hobbyists, or navel-gazers of any sort.
The image of an ivory tower appears in the Song of Solomon 7:4. From the Revised (King James) Version:
Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.
In medieval and Renaissance art and poetry, an ivory tower came to represent purity in general and the Virgin Mary in particular. And there are many such appearances of the term and imagery in literature and art through to the present day.
The present-day use of the phrase ivory tower in English, however, is a calque of the French tour d’ivoire. French literary critic Charles Augustin Sante-Beuve appears to have been the first to use the term in this sense. In an 1837 poem he criticizes the Romantic poet Alfred de Vigny as remaining isolated in an ivory tower, as opposed to the socially engaged Victor Hugo, who was active in contemporary French politics, and Dante, who was active in Florentine politics during his lifetime:
Hugo, dur partisan,
Comme chez Dante on voit , Florentin ou Pisan,
Un baron féodal, combattit sous l'armure,
Et tint haut sa bannière au milieu du murmure:
Il la maintient encore; et Vigny, plus secret,
Comme en sa tour d'ivoire, avant midi, rentrait.( Hugo, a hard partisan,
As we see with Dante, Florentine or Pisan,
A feudal baron, fought under armor,
And held high his banner amid the rumbling:
He still maintains it; and Vigny, more secretive,
As if in his ivory tower, before midday, returned.)
English use of this new French sense appears at the turn of the twentieth century, from an article on poetry by Francis Gummere published in October 1903:
The modern poet addresses a disintegrated throng; he appeals to that compound of thought and emotion which sunders itself from the mass of men, and returns to the sense of communal sympathy only upon the broadly human lines of a common fate. He has withdrawn from the crowd into his "ivory tower;" but he looks out on a world instead of a village green. He works alternately with microscope and telescope; you may see what he sees with either, but you must come singly into his tower.
But it was the unfinished and posthumously published 1917 novel The Ivory Tower by Henry James that really gave a boost to the use of the term:
There it was waiting for you. Isn’t it an ivory tower, and doesn’t living in an ivory tower just mean the most distinguished retirement? I don’t want yet awhile to settle in one myself—though I’ve always thought it a thing I should like to come to; but till I do make acquaintance with what you have for me a retreat for the mystery is pleasant to think of.
And ever since, scholars have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of living in them.
Sources:
Gummere, Francis B. “Primitive Poetry and the Ballad.” Modern Philology, 1.2, October 1903, 3–4. HathTrust Digital Archive.
James, Henry. The Ivory Tower. London: W. Collins Sons, 1917, 142–43. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. ivory tower, n.
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin. “A.M. Villemain.” Pensées d'Aout, third edition Brussels: Société Belge de librairie, 1838, 179. HathTrust Digital Archive.
Image credit: The Morgan Library and Museum. New York, Morgan Library MS G.5, fol. 18v. Public domain in the United States as a mechanical reproduction of a work of art that was produced before 1925.