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The Plot of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Arnold Goldman
Arnold Goldman
Affiliation:
Assistant Chief Officer of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), 344–54 Gray's Inn Rd, London WCIX 8BP. A version of this essay was delivered at the 1983 Conference of the Higher Education Teachers of English, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
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Extract

The Marble Faun's plot is alleged to be “Gothic” and impenetrable, its topography and history “guide-book,” its author external to his subject, too foreign (that is, American), too old (fifty-five), tired and ill to have had anything but a tourist's or artists' colony view of the Roman and Tuscan setting. Anyway, this charge runs, Hawthorne wrote Romances, fictions distanced from actuality and history, not outward-referring novels anchored in a context of exterior realities.

In fact Hawthorne sets the action of his Roman novel in a complex field of Italian history, past and present. There is not only an evocation of the pre-classical and imperial history of Rome and its Christian, Medieval and Renaissance periods; the status of the Papally-dominated, Frenchgarrisoned city is carefully delineated. Hawthorne mobilises not only the panoramic history which has been sensed but insufficiently discriminated but also the contemporaneous politics of the Roman, and Tuscan, states. Nor is the novel set in no particular time, but in fact on a very precise time-scale, and it may even be datable, from Monday, 5 April 1858, to Thursday, 3 March 1859 (see the Appendix at the end of this essay, pp. 403–4). The Marble Faun's contemporaneity remains unacknowledged.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , December 1984 , pp. 383 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 See, e.g., Dauber, Kenneth, Rediscovering Hawthorne(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), Ch. 6Google Scholar. To Dauber, “Italy remains alien” to Hawthorne (p. 196), “Hawthorne's landscape… is fundamentally factitious” (p. 217), and “The Cook's tour… gives the book its most consistent Structure…. In place of story we have touring. In place of the more usual narrative connectives… it is geography that leads us from scene to scene” (pp. 218–19). David Howard, in “The Fortunate Fall and Hawthorne's The Marble Faun,” considers that “what Rome we do get [is] a tourist's Rome of galleries, churches, and ruins” (in Romantic Mythologies, ed. Fletcher, Ian (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 97–136Google Scholar; quoted from p. 103). Howard sees Hawthorne suggesting more at times, but “diminishing” his own suggestions.

2 All page references to The Marble Faun are to the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Vol. 4, Ohio State University Press, 1968.

3 The reputation of Italian prisons for mortality, and for their political utility, would have been known to Hawthorne from Gladstone's obsessive campaign in the 1850s. See Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen on the State Prosecutions of the Neapolitan Government (London, 1851), esp. pp. 3, 4–5, 6, 11, 15 (1878 ed.)Google Scholar.

4 All page references to Hawthorne's journals are to the Centenary Edition…, Vol. 14, The French and Italian Notebooks, ed. Woodson, Thomas, Ohio State University Press, 1980Google Scholar.

5 In fact Leopold was the first Italian state ruler to fall in the agitation which ultimately produced a United Italy, and he had fled from Tuscany by the time Hawthorne composed the final draft of his novel. When Donatello and Kenyon converse of a June (see Appendix) it is before April 1859, when Leopold fled. By the time Hawthorne was redrafting The Marble Faun the battles of Magenta (4 June 1859) and Solferino (24 June) and the Treaty of Villafranca had sealed Leopold's fate – Tuscany was ceded to Piedmont.

In August and September 1859, a Tuscan assembly ratified the downfall of the Grand Duke and union with Piedmont:

“The Piedmontese had at first hoped that Leopold of Tuscany would grant a Constitution and side with them against Austria. Cavour had been prepared, as an alternative, to have Boncompagni, his diplomatic representative in Tuscany, overturn the Grand Duke and proclaim fusion with Piedmont….

“On April 27 Leopold fled, but the existence of a strong autonomist movement made immediate annexation by Piedmont impossible.” (Smith, Denis Mack, ed., The Making of Itay 1796–1870 (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 278Google Scholar. See also Woolf, Stuart, A History of ltay 1700–1860 (London: Methuen, 1979), pp. 450–51, 453Google Scholar.)

6 The name Luca Barboni, to whom the packet which Hilda attempts to deliver at the Palazzo Cenci is addressed, sounds like “Borboni,” the family name of the rulers of “southern Italy.” (Kenyon imagines “Barboni” may have been an “assumed name.”) As Hawthorne knew, Leopold's wife, Maria Antonia, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, was “a Bourbon, of the Naples family” (French and Italian Notebooks, p. 340): she was the daughter of the previous King of the Two Sicilies and the sister of the current king, Ferdinand II. (And their brother, Francis, Count of Trapani, married Maria Isabella, Princess of Tuscany, in 1850.)

Kenyon suggests that Barboni may have been “the medium of communication” between Miriam and one of her “family connections” who “occupied a position in the papal government”. “Barboni” are poodle-dogs in Italian (sc. lackey).

“Miriam” is, as we know, an assumed name. The commonest first name given to Bourbon daughters was Maria: four of the six daughters of the previous king were so named, as was his mother, Archduchess of Austria, and both his wives, the first of whom was also Archduchess of Austria. All of Ferdinand II's daughters were called Maria.

7 Howard argues that the Carnival “is given sufficient animation, despite [Hawthorne's] diminishing hand, to make it command the book. The impression of a ‘worn-out’ festival is gradually replaced… [and] becomes a magnificent image of a revolutionary condition…. There seems the possibility of a revolution in earnest” (Howard, p. 130). Howard's argument deserves the closest scrutiny. He believes that Hawthorne suggests but withdraws from creating “a revolutionary condition” (p. 99), that the “myth” of the novel remains “unattached to the historical moment of its setting” (p. 101), unlike those of The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. Nevertheless he sees continual intimations of what this essay claims to be more firmly embedded, e.g.:

“There is some indication that Hawthorne did intend through Hilda's disappearance late in the book to introduce some of [the] unexplored regions of Roman life. Most of the associations… seem covered by the Palace of the Cenci, where she disapears, and there is talk of a political intrigue connected with Miriam…. But nothing comes of it except a benign aged New England jesuit and a final vision of the old masters.

“But the failure really rests with the characterization of Miriam, Donatello, and the model, and the impossibility that their story should bear all the weight suggested of it, particularly the weight of the Roman past.” (p. 107)