The final novel by the first great American novelist has so much going for it in isolated moments that its undeniable dreadfulness as a whole winds up a thing of wonder.
Imagine a book so filled with magnificent vistas that one feels flush from the radiance of summer mornings that came and went 150 years ago. Imagine lengthy dialogues between a religious believer and a skeptic which genuinely respects the substance of both viewpoints. Imagine social and artistic discursions touching upon centuries of Western civilization.
Then imagine all this being secondary to a plot about whether a man has furry, pointy ears; how a glance can constitute complicity in a murder; and why two bland couples can somehow never find happiness together.
Set in Italy, where Hawthorne and his family lived off and on in the late 1850s, The Marble Faun follows the journey of three American artists and a mystifyingly impish Italian who accompanies them in Rome. To say Hawthorne was inspired by his surroundings is an understatement:
You look through a vista of century beyond century – through much shadow, and a little sunshine – through barbarism and civilization, alternating with one another, like actors that have pre-arranged their parts – through a broad pathway of progressive generations, bordered by palaces and temples, and bestridden by old, triumphal arches, until, in the distance, you behold the obelisks, with their unintelligible inscriptions, hinting at a Past indefinitely more remote than history can define.
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| Rome as depicted in the Illustrated London News, 1850. In The Marble Faun, the characters are often depicted visiting Roman ruins, which Hawthorne notes stand out in the city while edifices of a more recent past are entirely swept away. Image from https://www.iln.org.uk/iln_years/year/1850rome.htm |
There is appreciation in the above passage, and also despair. Upon the characters of The Marble Faun the grandeur that was and is Rome acts as stimulant and depressant. Perhaps it is because they are artists aspiring to create lasting works, fearing they might fall short. But there is also an existential aspect to their unease, a sense of life’s ultimate transitory nature where the finest sculptures are doomed to dust:
If we consider the present city as at all connected with the famous one of old, it is only because we find it built over its grave.
This arresting viewpoint frequently clouds Hawthorne’s lens. A bigger adjustment to be made by the reader is in the form of patience. Hawthorne hits the same points over and over through the course of the book, in the form of extended dialogues between different pairings of the four main characters. No matter how fine and delicately beautiful the prose, this gets claustrophobic and tedious over 50 chapters.
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| An 1850 edition of The Marble Faun. Originally subtitled The Romance Of Monte Beni, it was first published in the United Kingdom, where Hawthorne took up brief residency so he could claim an overseas copyright to prevent legal pirating of the work. Image from https://www.abebooks.com/ |
More than the other three Hawthorne romances, its dialogue has an artificial quality, veering between maudlin and melodramatic:
“I live in the midst of a curse, that hems me round with a circle of fire! No innocent thing can come near me!”
“Fancy a nightly assemblage of eight thousand melancholy and remorseful ghosts, looking down from those tiers of broken arches, striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again!”
“A happy person is such an unaccustomed and holy creature, in this sad world!”
That last line is uttered by Miriam, a beautiful painter of mysterious origin whose ambiguous witness of a deadly crime is the rusty hinge upon which the plot turns.
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| Having left Rome, a contrite Miriam stands before a bronze statue of Pope Julius in Perugia, Italy, as Kenyon and Donatello look on. "A blessing was felt descending upon them from his outstretched hand; he approved, by look and gesture, the pledge of a deep union that had passed under his auspices." Illustration by Alice Barber Stephens, circa 1900 from https://fineartamerica.com/featured/1-hawthorne-the-marble-faun-granger.html |
A woman haunted by a mysterious past, not to mention a shadowy figure known only as “the Model,” Miriam is another of Hawthorne’s arresting female creations. While lacking the allegorical definition of Hester Prynne or the perverse charm of Hepzibah Pyncheon from The House Of Seven Gables, Miriam speaks the best lines and drives the story:
“As these busts in the block of marble,” thought Miriam, “so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time. We fancy that we carve it out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action.”
Otherwise you have Kenyon the sculptor, extemporizing at length on art but blushing at the Italian tendency of depicting female nudes; fair and innocent Hilda, who befriends the doves frequenting her tower above the city; and Donatello, an Italian noble whose mysterious ears suggest a faun or two in the family tree. Each is more irritating than memorable.
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| An ancient sculpture of a mythical satyr, or faun, is likened to Donatello early in the book. Hawthorne plays coy with this identification throughout the narrative. "There was an indefinable characteristic of Donatello, which set him outside the rules," he writes. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resting_Satyr |
If Hawthorne had one deep flaw running through all his fiction, it was his inability to incorporate more than a handful of characters in his stories. Dickens he was not. This is not as much of a problem in his other works; here with the Eternal City and its environs being his canvas, the absence of secondary characters or subplots is more glaring.
A terrific review of the novel by Sententiae Antiquae points out the presence of a fifth character, Rome itself. The city serves both as the main location and the main point of distinction in the way the other four characters interact with it. Hilda embraces it as a source of beauty, while rustic Donatello sees menace.
Late in the novel, Kenyon finds himself trapped in the surging festivities of a Roman carnival, imagining the flying confetti soiled by the grimy streets around him:
If decrepit and melancholy Rome smiles, and laughs broadly, indeed, at Carnival-time, it is not in the old simplicity of real mirth, but with a half-conscious effort, like our self-deceptive pretence of jollity at a threadbare joke.
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| The plot of Marble Faun reaches its climax at a Roman festival. Hawthorne writes: "The stately avenue of the Corso was peopled with hundreds of fantastic shapes, some of which probably represented the mirth of ancient times, surviving, through all manner of calamity, ever since the days of the Roman Empire." Image from https://www.wantedinrome.com/news/carnevale-romano-the-story-of-romes-carnival.html |
Hawthorne’s take on Rome is so caustic at times that it stands out as the novel’s most memorable feature. There is a kind of rejection of the city’s high place in Western culture married to fulsome appreciation for its glories and hidden treasures. That generations of American travelers came to Italy clutching Marble Faun as a guidebook, visiting specific places mentioned in it to commune with its ghosts, is kind of perverse.
He seems especially fascinated and troubled by Catholicism and its rites, “cordials, certainly, it possesses in abundance, and sedatives, in inexhaustible variety, and what may once have been genuine medicaments, though little the worse for long keeping.”
Late in the novel, a visit by Hilda to a confessional is dangled near the end of the book as a matter of suspense, especially for Kenyon, who while not much for churchgoing himself, fears Hilda drifting from her Protestant roots. “Avoid the convent, my dear friend, as you would shun the death of the soul,” he tells her.
Did Hawthorne feel that way, too? Certainly that sentiment didn’t run in the family; his daughter Rose eventually became a Catholic nun and founded her own order, the Dominican Order of Hawthorne, which exists to this day. But like the nudes, he seemed uncomfortable by his proximity to something his New England upbringing deemed so sinful.
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| The head of John Gibson's Tinted Venus, a then-contemporary sculpture on classic themes which offended Hawthorne for its immodest coloration of a nude female. Miriam declares she "would be glad to see as many heaps of quick-lime in their stead!" Image from https://www.ancientartpodcast.org/blog/tinted-venus-painted-aphrodite-coloring-the-past/tinted-venus-john-gibson-1862-liverpool/ |
At its best, The Marble Faun is a treatise on how sin is addressed by different faiths, and whether, in pursuit of a longstanding Hawthorne theme, there is really such as thing as an Unforgivable Sin. Perhaps picking up on Catholic teachings around redemption, he suggests sin can be a net positive in the shaping of character. An angel besmirched with worldly grime is preferable in his eyes to one untainted by struggle.
Miriam expresses a like sentiment to Hilda when the two fall out:
“You have no sin, nor any conception of what it is; and therefore you are so terribly severe! As an angel, you are not amiss; But, as a human creature, and a woman among earthly men and women, you need a sin to soften you!”
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| More pleasing to Hawthorne's sensibilities were the frescos of Fra Angelico, like this one from the 1420s depicting the Annunciation. "When one studies them faithfully, it is like holding a conversation about heavenly things with a tender and devout-minded man," he has Kenyon enthuse. Image from https://art-in-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/fra-angelico-annunciation-convent-of.html |
In the novel’s preface, Hawthorne acknowledges this is his first novel in seven years, and suggests his native land is to blame:
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my own dear native land.
As this came out in 1860, I can only guess that Hawthorne was being sarcastic. It is strange that an author who latched on to some classic American themes would suddenly seek out Europe for interesting material during the run up to Fort Sumter. Regardless, he would not be the last American author to look across the Atlantic for inspiration.
Other readers complain about lengthy descriptions of places, but for me a higher hurdle are the rambling criticisms of artists and artworks both old and new that were making the continental scene in the 1850s. If not as long as the travel descriptions, these passages do run on.
In fact, when Hawthorne commits to pure travel writing, the results are powerful, whether taking in an ancient burial chamber under the city or a tower set along a pastoral landscape. But these run on, too; in an introduction to my Oxford World Classics edition Susan Manning notes how passages were pulled verbatim from Hawthorne’s travel journals.
Hilda at one point declares: “Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”
Unlike
Hawthorne’s better works, The Marble Faun leaves this worthy concept
somewhere in the Etruscan dust. What is left is both overwritten and
underbaked, full of brilliant ideas and observations and redolent with
descriptive beauty, yet all the while fatally, frustratingly inert.
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