Hawthorne's Roman Holiday

_"The Marble Faun and the Waste of History" by Millicent Bell, in Southern Review (Spring 1999), 43 Allen Hall, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge, La. 70803–5005._

Seldom read today, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860) was the closest thing to a bestseller that eminent author ever had. Early readers were particularly taken with the descriptive views of Rome accompanying the narrative. A New York Times reviewer predicted (accurately) that the novel would serve as a guidebook for visitors to the Eternal City. Modern critics, however, have usually been dismissive of the work’s travelogue aspect—wrongly so, asserts Bell, an emeritus professor of English at Boston University and the author of Hawthorne’s View of the Artist (1962). Hawthorne’s "allegedly undigested and inferior descriptions" serve an important "poetic function" in the novel, Bell says.

The Marble Faun, she notes, was the pioneering "international novel." In works of this genre, Americans abroad (Hilda and Kenyon in this case) experience a moral and cultural encounter with the Old World. "Like [Henry] James’s travelers later," Bell writes, "Hawthorne’s visitors to Rome find themselves putting their Americanness to the test. Sin and suffering overtake the European Miriam and Donatello, and in coming to terms with them the Americans undergo a trial of their inherited Puritan ethic."

Of the novel’s four protagonists, Bell observes, "only Hilda emerges unchanged, still a Puritan maiden; Kenyon, who might have accepted the lesson of his Roman experience, lays his knowledge aside." The two return to America, "where, as Kenyon told Donatello, ‘each generation has only its own sins and sorrows to bear.’ The ‘weary and dreary Past’ is not piled ‘upon the back of the Present,’ as it is in Rome."

In framing this story, Bell says, the narrator’s scenic musings sound like a musical undertone and "qualify Hilda’s optimistic idealism," offering "a stoic and ironic vision" of history, the perpetual making and remaking of the past’s debris. Contemporary Rome, says the narrator—and Hawthorne, "seems like nothing but a heap of broken rubbish thrown into the great chasm between our own days and the Empire."

The book’s oft-ignored descriptions, Bell says, "present a view of the human record as a chronicle not only of confusion and flux but successive miseries, treacheries, and bloodshed. Above all, bloodshed." As Hawthorne (1804–64) was writing The Marble Faun, the Civil War loomed on the horizon. Within months of its publication, Fort Sumter would be fired upon. Hawthorne, writes Bell, would become "a lonely dissenter among war enthusiasts," foreseeing "a society in which the world he had known might be as altered and reduced to fragments as the Roman past."