The Marble Faun

The Marble Faun (1860) was the last of the four major romances by Nathaniel Hawthorne. After writing The Blithedale Romance in 1852, Hawthorne, approaching fifty, turned away from publication and obtained a political appointment as American Consul in Liverpool, England, an appointment which he held from 1853 to 1857. In 1858, Hawthorne and his wife Sophia Peabody moved to Italy and became essentially tourists for a year and a half.

The Marble Faun is Hawthorne's most unusual romance, and possibly one of the strangest major works of American fiction.^{[original research?]} Writing on the eve of the American Civil War, Hawthorne set his story in a fantastical Italy. The romance mixes elements of a fable, pastoral, gothic novel, and travel guide. The climax comes less than halfway through the story, and Hawthorne intentionally fails to answer many of the reader's questions about the characters and the plot. (Complaints about this led Hawthorne to add a Postscript to the second edition).

Characters

The four main characters are Miriam, a beautiful painter who is compared to Eve, Beatrice Cenci, Lady Macbeth, Judith, and Cleopatra, and is being pursued by a mysterious, threatening Model; Hilda, an innocent copyist who is compared to the Virgin Mary; Kenyon, a sculptor, who represents rationalist humanism; and Donatello, the Count of Monti Beni, who is compared to Adam, resembles the Faun of Praxiteles, and is probably only half human.

Publication history and response

Encouraged to write a book in three volumes, Hawthorne included lengthy descriptions that critics found distracting or boring.^[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson called the novel "mush"^[2] but James Russell Lowell with pleased with it and praised it as a Christian parable.^[1] Reviews were generally favorable, though many were confused by the ending. William Dean Howells later wrote: "Everybody was reading it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yieling him that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his life."^[3] Friend and critic Edwin Percy Whipple noted that, even if Hawthorne had written nothing else, The Marble Faun would qualify him as a master of English composition.^[1]

Analysis

In the spring of 1858, Hawthorne was inspired to write his romance when he saw the Faun of Praxiteles in a Roman sculpture gallery.^{[citation needed]}

The theme, characteristic of Hawthorne, is guilt and the Fall of Man.^{[citation needed]}

Influence

The Marble Faun has been cited as an influence on H. P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.^[4]

Weldon Kees' third collection of poems, Poems 1947-1954 opens with an epigraph from the Marble Faun.

Frederic Tuten's 1972 novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March uses an extensive quote from the sculptor's studio segment of the book, placing them alongside details of Chinese history from 1912 to Mao's rise to power.

Trivia

• In the documentary film Grey Gardens, Edith Bouvier Beale refers to teenage handyman Jerry Torre as "the Marble Faun" for reasons she does not explain.

• The Marble Faun is also the title of a collection of poetry published in 1924 by William Faulkner.

• "Rereading The Marble Faun" is the name of a song written by Dan Bejar (aka. Destroyer). It was released on Destroyer's second album, City of Daughters.

References

• Bleiler, Everett (1948). The Checklist of Fantastic Literature. Chicago: Shasta Publishers. p. 145. 

Notes

External links

• The Marble Faun — Volume 1 at Project Gutenberg
• The Marble Faun — Volume 2 at Project Gutenberg