Just what is it about fame that so alienates women? or, why is it that famous women often speak of their experience of celebrity as something that is ultimately lonely and a shabby substitute for love? And why are these statements of loneliness in celebrity attenuated for mothers? Whether it is a famous American author of the nineteenth century and mother of seven, Harriet Beecher Stowe; an iconic and volatile star of the mid–twentieth century and mother of three, Judy Garland; or a twenty-first-century reality celebrity and mother of eight, Kate Gosselin, these women suggest that the experiences of fame are isolating and ultimately unsatisfying. To paraphrase Stowe, it is not fame and celebrity that satisfies the heart of the female star; it is the old-fashioned comforts of love. Their combined comments are thus a corrective to fans' implied perception of famous people as happy, when, indeed, their celebrity seems to have alienated them from love. Whether the female celebrity seeks romantic or familial love is not clear, and we would do well to realize that the abstract palliative is actually a culturally imagined comfort that probably has little to do with either these women in particular or stardom more broadly. But the consistent remarks about fame as a condition of loneliness establish a discursive imperative that the famous woman speak of longing for affective completion, in turn suggesting that public ardor cannot satisfy the woman's heart. In other words, fame cannot replace love.

Dante refers persistently in his writing to the great injustice of his exile. Up until his last years, he continues to lament his inability to return home. Originally banished for two years after being indicted by his political enemies for corruption and graft in 1302, he was subsequently sentenced, along with his sons, to death by fire if he ever dared to reenter Florence. The animosity toward his fellow citizens he expresses in his writing, alongside his frustrated sense of betrayal, is thus easy to understand. In works such as De vulgari eloquentia and the Convivio, he bitterly evokes the conditions of his banishment, while in the Latin epistles he succinctly and tellingly identifies himself as an exul immeritus (“undeserving exile”).

Charismatic celebrities have open wounds. Fans have probing fingers. Drawn together by doubt, as in Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, they collaborate in hopes of reassurance. The baroque painter shows Christ guiding the hand of the doubting apostle, who finds the bloodless hole and inserts his index finger up to the second knuckle. The quizzical expression on Thomas's face highlights by contrast Christ's patient indulgence as they come together in an impromptu ritual of verification, initiating what a recent theorist of celebrity calls the Saint Thomas effect, which describes the need of fans for intimate authentication, insisting, as they tend to do, on all the gory details (Rojek 62). The deep contradictions at the heart of celebrity incite this relentless probing: a divine being, apparently not at all like them (having risen from the dead, for instance), may prove in crucially titillating ways to be just like them after all. But what the millions of fingers seek they never satisfactorily find. For the celebrity to remain celebrated, the contradiction that defines his or her mystery must remain in continual uncertainty, flickering between highlight and shadow, visibility and invisibility, teasing the eyes of the beholders and leaving them in doubt, like the searing effect of Caravaggio's chiaroscuro, which catches Saint Thomas at a moment of suspense, still undecided between skepticism and belief.

Celebrity relies on a gaze, a collective or public regard that, in gazing, confers value. Celebrity also demands a face to celebrate—faciality is a sine qua non of “celebrification.” The historian Peter Brown demonstrates in The Cult of the Saints that late antiquity introduced the overriding importance of saints' images, bodies, relics, or tomb sites in a Christian worship that emphasized the mediation of saints between heaven and earth and in place of angels; celebrity had its origins in the woodcut portraits and wayside shrines that proliferated as well as in the professionally wrought iconic images of the saints. Against David Hume's judgment of this phenomenon as “vulgar” and a remnant of pagan folk religion, he argues that the rise of the cult of the saints was as influenced by elites, including Augustine, as by supposedly lesser folk, and that the latter, especially women and the poor, were thus able to participate in a democratizing of culture profoundly indebted to graveside practices that promoted personal relationships, even friendships, with the dead saints and the circulation of their faces in imagery and their body parts as relics (17). Moreover, far from introducing vulgarity into Christian rituals, Brown shows how the cult was imbued with the culture of classical antiquity and with values associated with Athenian democracy and the philosophy of nous, a non-rational intelligence linking us to the divine (48). That we deploy the term celebrity icon for such figures as Oprah or Angelina Jolie only underscores the vestiges of public religious ritual that remain embedded in celebrity practices and the nimbus of the sacred that haloes even seemingly debased celebrity discourses.