The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Raise your hand if you slogged through The Scarlet Letter in high school. I distinctly remember how much hate this book elicited from my 11th-grade English class. Secretly though, I kind of loved Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of sin, hypocrisy and guilt among the Puritans.

Still, I never returned to Hawthorne until just now, when I decided to read The Marble Faun, his final completed novel. The book centers on a group of young expatriate artists in 19th-century Rome who become engulfed in a tragedy, a premise that sounded quite intriguing. But after finishing it, I am a lot more sympathetic to my high school classmates and their antipathy toward the The Scarlet Letter. This book is dense, slow and the writing is archaic. I almost gave up around the halfway mark. Would I recommend it? Not really. But it does have some interesting things to say about Hawthorne's favorite theme: guilt.

Published in 1860, The Marble Faun is the product of Hawthorne's own sojourn in Italy, where he lived with his family in the late 1850s. The main characters are Hilda, a devout Christian from New England who is a skilled copyist of the great painters; Kenyon, an American sculptor who pines for Hilda, and even creates a model of her hand out of despair when he thinks he has no hope of winning it; Donatello, an ethereal Italian count who is likened to the faun of Roman mythology (a gentle creature who is half-human and half-goat); and Miriam, a beautiful and enigmatic painter with a secret past.

The story, at its most basic level, is about a murder and its aftermath. Miriam is stalked by an unknown assailant. In one impulsive moment, Donatello throws the man — we never find out exactly who he is — off a cliff when he and Miriam are out for a ramble near the Catacombs. Hilda witnesses the killing from a distance and is horrified by what she has seen. She breaks off all contact with Miriam, who had been her closest confidante, and turns inward as she grapples with what she perceives as her loss of moral purity.

I had the odd thought while reading the book that there were some parallels with The Sun Also Rises, another novel about American expatriates in Europe. Hawthorne goes off on tangents describing famous sites in Rome, and Hemingway's novel, too, sometimes reads like a travelogue with little connection to the plot. But whereas Hemingway's characters are louche and amoral, Hawthorne's are consumed by righteousness and morality. Hilda, for example, sees only good and evil — nothing in between.

The Marble Faun was Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published novel.

A disturbing aspect of this book is Hawthorne's characterization of Miriam, who is Jewish. Again, there is a slight overlap with Hemingway, who portrays the Jewish character, Robert Cohn, as the outsider among the group of friends eating and drinking their way through France and Spain. Hawthorne, though, invokes much more sinister tropes, portraying Miriam as an exotic temptress and the proximate cause of all the trouble that ensues by tempting Donatello to commit a sin. She is depicted as almost blithely accepting of the murder and thus lacking the humanity of the Christian characters who are gripped by remorse.

There are many allusions in the book to the Garden of Eden and the loss of innocence. Donatello, with his otherworldly beauty, is as pure as Adam. But Miriam is no Eve, whose temptation was born out of a childlike curiosity. She is instead more like the serpent. Meanwhile, Donatello is transformed after the killing into a guilt-stricken shell of his former self. The novel follows his unraveling as he returns to his family's country estate, which, in keeping with the Garden of Eden theme, is pure and idyllic, in contrast to Hawthorne's depiction of Rome as decaying and gloomy.

As I read The Marble Faun, I was reminded of something else set among the ancient ruins in Italy, a fantastic short story by Edith Wharton titled "Roman Fever." Written in 1934, the entire story takes place on the terrace of a café overlooking the Colosseum, where two American widows reflect on their youth. I don't want to give anything away, except to say that it has one of the best last lines I've ever read. I spent 15 minutes re-reading it and, wow, this story really is as great as I remembered. So, I think that will be my recommendation for this week: you can read it for free here.