CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hawthorne entices, appalls.
Emily Dickinson
APPROACHING the city, St. Peter’s radiant in the sky-blue distance, the Hawthornes asked their driver—they called him the Emperor—to stop the horses. One by one they stepped out of the carriage. Sophia went first. “ROME ROME ROME.” Only capital letters would do. “I can now understand the irresistible attraction it has to those who return a second time,” she cried. “Now that I have known it once, Rome certainly does draw into itself my heart,” Nathaniel admitted.
Incorrigible realist, he added, “Besides, we are to stay here six months.”
Quite a long time, noted the imperturbable Sophia, “to such Arabs as we have been lately.”
The Hawthornes climbed back into the carriage, the Emperor cracked his leather whip, and six horses, heads bent forward, galloped toward the Porta del Popolo.
He now liked the crowded Corso, a noble street, he said. He scaled the marble steps of the Capitoline Museum without a murmur and marched valiantly through the picture galleries. Even the roasted chestnuts, sold on the street, tasted good to him.
The lodgings were satisfactory. That helped. Cephas Thompson had found the Hawthornes a seven-room apartment at 68 Piazza Poli. Equipped with a facsimile of a Franklin stove and plenty of carpets—there had been none in the Palazzo Laranzani—it promised warmth, especially in Hawthorne’s study, and comfort. Late at night, when the city fell quiet, Hawthorne could hear the splash of the Trevi Fountain, just a block away, as he drifted to sleep.
The American colony welcomed them, the Storys, Hatty Hosmer, Joseph Mozier, and of course Thompson, the latter bursting with the Louisa Lander scandal. Lander, it seems, had been living with a man on “uncommonly good terms” and posing as a model in risqué clothes, it was said, to show off her good figure. Punctilious, the American expatriate community appointed William Story to interview anyone who could vouch for Miss Lander’s drowning reputation, and Hawthorne rather hoped Lander would acquit herself. She wouldn’t stoop to such folly and refused to be interviewed.
So the Hawthornes turned their backs. “Miss Lander’s life (as she truly observes) lies between her Maker and herself,” Hawthorne conceded in a formal letter, perhaps never sent. Until she cleared her name, he continued, his prose as rigid as toy soldiers, his pronouns third-person stiff, the Hawthornes simply could not admit her to their home. “Any attempt at social intercourse with her former friends (especially where young people and children are included in the number) should have been preceded by a full explanation and refutation of those reports,” Hawthorne declared.
Lander left Rome.
Hawthorne’s good mood fell apart. Lander’s disgrace, the pitiless drizzle, another bout of grippe: Rome flattened the soul. “I have suffered more in Rome from low spirits than almost anywhere else,” he told Franklin Pierce. Yet the persistent influenza and distemper—sporadic, provoking—paled next to the long death struggle of Una.
It began on the Thursday after their arrival. Sophia was descanting about Praxiteles’ Faun in her journal. Suddenly she dropped her pen mid-sentence and snapped the book shut. Five days later, on October 26, slimy rain clung to the windows, and Una burned with fever.
They moved her into Hawthorne’s study. She first was diagnosed incorrectly and then—correctly—with malaria, or Roman fever, a disease that smolders, subsides, and then darts back to rack the body with chill, the mind with delirium. Una rallied and relapsed. She chanted “like a tragic heroine,” her father despaired, “—as if the fever lifted her feet off the earth.” Every two hours she was given quinine. “The ill effects of the large doses … were probably quite as lasting and injurious as those of the fever itself,” Julian concluded, with good reason, years later.
In three weeks, she seemed well enough to take a drive with Mrs. Story, but at the end of November her face flushed purple and her temperature shot back up.
Malaria probably toppled Ada Shepard in January. With Sophia exhausted from nursing both girls, Hawthorne still managed somehow to closet himself in his study, writing an hour or two each day on a romance begun the day of Una’s illness. “I have been trying to tear [it] out of my mind,” he told Fields; writing kept him from going mad. In February he finished a rough draft. “As for my success, I can’t say much,” he wrote to Fields; “indeed, I don’t know what to say at all. I only know that I have produced what seems to be a larger amount of Scribble than either of my former Romances, and that portions of it interested me a good deal while I was writing them; but I have had too many interruptions, from things to see and things to suffer, that the story has developed itself in a very imperfect way, and will have to be revised hereafter.”
Soon Hawthorne himself was in bed. “I never knew that I had either bowels or lungs, till I came to Rome,” he grimly wrote to Ticknor, “but I have found it out now, to my cost.” Sophia suspected that he too had malaria, although he seemed to be stronger, sipping beef broth, quite unlike the stricken Una, so slow to recover. Weakness shook her hand as she walked with her father down the Corso at Carnival time, two invalids in the pestilential city.
Carnival revelry: not for him. Hawthorne wanted to leave Rome as quickly as possible. Mid-April sounded good. They could hire a carriage to take them to Geneva and Paris, then cross the Channel to England, stop over in London, and swing the Wayside gate open in July. By August he’d be revising his new book and outlining another to pay for the renovations he was imagining now that they’d lived in the Villa Montauto.
It was a good plan, foiled in March. Una had crashed. Dr. Franco diagnosed galloping consumption. “God help us!” Hawthorne scribbled in his pocket diary. He gestured toward Sophia. “I don’t know what will become of her when she loses hope,” he winced. But Sophia, resolute, kept vigil at Una’s side, day and night, for two weeks. “I am going to die now,” the girl murmured to her mother. “There is no use in living,” she repeated. “Goodbye, dear.” Sophia said nothing. Una said “Goodbye, dear” again and faced the wall, waiting for death.
Not healthy herself, Ada replaced Sophia at Una’s bedside while fending off the advances of Dr. Franco, their lecherous homeopath. It must have been a confused, unhappy household. Sophia watched over Una and sidestepped Nathaniel, whose eye she avoided lest they both break down; Ada dodged Dr. Franco, who kept lunging after her for a kiss; Julian raged against fate in the privacy of his room; and Rose, bewildered, lonely Rose, said or did nothing of note. Long afterwards, Julian remembered his father trying hard to keep up appearances, shuffling cards for whist every night until, hammered by grief, he put them down. “We won’t play any more,” he announced.
Early in April, Dr. Franco told Sophia that Una might not survive the night. “It is not natural that the young should die,” she sobbed. “I always knew I was not worthy of her.” It was Sophia’s finest hour. She resolved to tell Hawthorne what Franco had said—“drop the thunderbolts gently at his feet”—and when she did, Hawthorne passed a quivering hand through his hair. “I do not remember what I said then,” she recalled, “but I left him & went back to my post.”
For the sake of Nathaniel and the children, Sophia contrived to stay silent, organized, and stalwart, propped up by the expatriate community that rallied to her side in all the ways meaningful to her, a line of well-wishing carriages constantly at the Piazza Poli door, itself crowded with cards and flowers and fussing friends. Even Mrs. Browning, who rarely emerged from her villa, rushed to the Hawthorne house.
And there was Franklin Pierce, come to relieve her of Hawthorne. The former president and his wife, vacationing in Rome, refused to leave the city until Una improved. At least once a day, sometimes as many as three times, Pierce called at 68 Piazza Poli to draw Hawthorne outdoors. Hawthorne grabbed his hat and meandered with Pierce over the winding streets, two friends of thirty-five years, Pierce attentive lest Hawthorne pout too long. Sophia said she owed her husband’s sanity to him. “No one else could have supplied his place.”
Hawthorne discussed Pierce’s presidential prospects, which seemed nil to Hawthorne, and though Pierce protested he’d never run again—his usual strategy—Hawthorne knew Pierce would likely jump at the chance. Hawthorne didn’t necessarily think it a bad idea. Pierce had fully risen to what the office demanded, he reasoned. True, Pierce had not risen beyond what the office demanded, nor was he a political visionary, but Pierce knew, according to Hawthorne, “with a miraculous intuition of what ought to be done, just at the time for action. His judgment of things about him is wonderful.” Other Americans, most of them, disagreed violently. Said one of the old party faithful who’d since lost faith, “The Kansas outrages are all imputable to him, and if he is not called to answer for them here, ‘In Hell they’ll roast him like a herring.’ ”
Hawthorne didn’t care a fig for such calumny. “I did not know what comfort there might be in the manly sympathy of a friend,” he wrote in his journal; “but Pierce has undergone so great a sorrow of his own, and has so large and kindly a heart, and is so tender and so strong, that he really did us good, and I shall always love him the better for the recollection of these dark days.”
Never again would Pierce receive better or more genuine praise.
May arrived, sweet-smelling and nonchalant. Una’s fever had broken. Thin and wan, she had raised her weary head, cherry-wood hair all gone, lopped off at doctor’s orders. Hands trembling, she had asked for her knitting needles. Dr. Franco was outraged. He forbade her to sew or read or talk, and the Hawthornes must remain in Rome, he insisted, for the recuperation.
But Hawthorne needed a change of air and circumstance almost as much as Una. “He says he should die if he should come to Rome another winter,” Sophia reported to Elizabeth Peabody. He wasn’t well. “The malaria certainly disturbs him, though it is undeveloped.” He walked the Pincian Hill and stood, cigar in hand, looking down at the ancient, complex city. How he hated Rome; how he loved it. “But (life being too short for such questionable and troublesome enjoyments),” said he, “I desire never to set eyes on it again.”
Maybe so, but he was to occupy himself with it—or it with him—for the next six months.
On June 23, 1859, the Hawthornes touched British soil, and once they’d arrived in London, the trusty Bennoch directed the lot of them to a boardinghouse on Golden Square, near Piccadilly. Hawthorne arranged passage to America for mid-August and busied himself with Fields, in London with his second wife, and Pierce, now in London too. Pierce presented Hawthorne with a slim whalebone cane topped in silver for their walks together, past and future. Sophia stayed indoors, having enveloped herself in a nervous headache. “My fatigue is something infinite,” she explained. “All I can do is to sit in parks, and muse over pictures, and preserve silence.”
She had been the only one sorry to leave Rome.
She excused herself from most invitations, and in her absence Hawthorne brought Julian with him to breakfast at the Fieldses’, where they met Mrs. Annie Adams Fields for the first time. She was a bright young woman, and at twenty-five, seventeen years younger than her husband. Slender where Fields was portly, calm where he was talkative, Brahmin where he was plebeian, she had married the publisher in 1854. “I have known her since childhood,” Fields had crowed at the time, “and have held her on my knee many and many a time.” Just a girl then, in five years she had matured into an observant woman independent in thought and action, should she choose to exercise them. She did not. The quintessence of Boston’s Back Bay, Annie Fields was gracious, reserved, literary, secure, and tactful, the perfect idolatrous complement for the city’s liveliest publisher.
She liked Hawthorne. Bashful and mild, she thought him, and thoroughly unpretentious. Speaking in a low voice, he talked about his new novel, face twitching with evident apprehension. Or perhaps infirmity. In any case, he’d prepared friends for his altered appearance. He’d grown a mustache—Sophia said it made him look like a bandit—and his hair was frizzled with gray. The Italian adventure, he told Bennoch, left him wrinkled, shabby, travel-worn, and bald. “He is entirely unchanged in heart & genius,” Pierce loyally reported to Horatio Bridge. “Can anything better be said of any man?”
Fields sold Hawthorne’s new book to the British firm of Smith & Elder, which offered six hundred pounds for the rights. “It was a proposition gratifying to his pride & agreeable enough to his purse and was of course accepted,” Pierce informed Bridge of the deal. But it meant Hawthorne wouldn’t return to America right away, having agreed to stay in England to revise the book and hand it over for typesetting. In turn, Smith & Elder would send advance sheets to Ticknor & Fields. (Again, the issue was copyright. To protect it, the British and American editions of a book had to appear simultaneously.) Since the book wouldn’t be finished at least until the fall, much too late for an Atlantic crossing, Hawthorne would have to stay until spring.
Foiled again. “I think of Mamma,” Una rationalized, “& that comforts me, for I really believe it is the saving of her life to stay.”
For the summer the Hawthornes settled in Redcar, Yorkshire, a fishing village turned seaside resort. “It is as bleak and dreary a strip of sand as we could have stumbled upon, had we sought the whole world over,” Hawthorne cheerily informed Bennoch; “and the gray German ocean tumbles in upon us, within twenty yards of our door.” Far from the fuss of London, he could write as if a young man again striding over Salem Point.
They rented a two-story house—“a nutshell,” Sophia called it—on High Street near the waterfront. Ada Shepard had returned to America but fortunately Fanny Wrigley, Rose’s former nursemaid, had come to help out, for Sophia slept most of the day unless dragged along the beach in her bath chair. Hawthorne disappeared after breakfast for six hours at a stretch, and after dinner he hiked along the shore or took Julian swimming. In the evening he walked out again to the water. “The sea entirely restored Mr. Hawthorne,” Sophia was glad to report to Elizabeth.
In the middle of October, with spirits up and summer over, the Hawthornes went back to Leamington for the winter, and Hawthorne dispatched most of the manuscript (429 pages) to Smith & Elder. “As usual he thinks the book good for nothing, and based upon a very foolish idea which nobody will like or accept,” Sophia reported to Elizabeth after reading a large chunk of it. Aversion aside, he set about finishing it, and accepted Sophia’s minor suggestions, like changing the color of Italian houses, which she said he’d got wrong, and altering the name of a main character from Graydon to Kenyon. On November 9, 1859, he sent the remaining 79 pages to the publisher.
The book had no title. Hawthorne toyed with several, including “Monte Beni; or, The Faun: A Romance.” (“Monte Beni is our beloved Montauto,” Sophia explained to Elizabeth.) He also played with “The Romance of a Faun,” “Marble and Life; a Romance,” “Marble and Man; a Romance,” and his favorite, “St. Hilda’s Shrine,” which Ticknor used when he advertised the book in America. Fields suggested “The Romance of Monte Beni,” but Smith & Elder preferred “Transformation,” which they claimed Hawthorne himself had recommended. He denied it. If anything, he’d offered “The Transformation.” But he went along, begging Ticknor at least to call the American version of the book “The Marble Faun.”
Published as Transformation (a good title) in England on February 28, 1860, the new novel appeared in America, bound in maroon and gold, a week later—still within the copyright limit—as The Marble Faun. The subtitle to both editions had been Fields’s idea: “The Romance of Monte Beni.”
Whatever its title, the novel was so modern it baffled many of its first readers and many contemporary ones too, for age and time and the unbearable illness of Una, or mortality, are its main constituents, all wrenched from Hawthorne’s Italian experiences and his overpowering sense of despair. “A wonderful book,” sighed Longfellow; “but with the old, dull pain in it that runs through all Hawthorne’s writings.”
It’s an exquisite sentence (if a periodic sentence this long can be called exquisite) and lyrical, biblical, confident, heartfelt.
“When we have once known Rome,” Hawthorne writes about two thirds through The Marble Faun,
and left her where she lies, like a long decaying corpse, retaining a trace of the noble shape it was, but with accumulated dust and a fungous growth overspreading all its more admirable features;—left her in utter weariness, no doubt, of her narrow, crooked, intricate streets, so uncomfortably paved with little squares of lava that to tread over them is a penitential pilgrimage, so indescribably ugly, moreover, so cold, so alley-like, into which the sun never falls, and where a chill wind forces its deadly breath into our lungs;—left her, tired of the sight of those immense, seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cookshops, coblers’ stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky;—left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside, by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed, at night;—left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man’s integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of sour bread, sour wine, rancid butter, and bad cookery, needlessly bestowed on evil meats;—left her, disgusted with the pretence of Holiness and the reality of Nastiness, each equally omnipresent;—left her, half-lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up, long ago, or corrupted by myriads of slaughters;—left her, crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her ruin, and the hopelessness of her future;—left her, in short, hating her with all our might, and adding our individual curse to the Infinite Anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down;—when we have left Rome in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more intimately our own home, than even the spot where we were born!
The tension of leaving—of having left—resolved by the pleasure of coming back: here and in the entire novel, Hawthorne expresses his deep ambivalence about Rome, for Rome to Hawthorne had become something beyond itself and its daily annoyances, something beyond the noise and confusion and the long sweep of history; it had become dear in the ways that home is dear and home is hateful, both for the very same reasons.
Rome, Salem, Hawthorne: the past is never dead. In Rome the physical evidence of the past is written into every paving stone, making it for Hawthorne a fitting emblem of romance. And Italy itself exists as much in the imagination as in the real world, as Hawthorne writes in the preface to The Marble Faun; it’s “a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon, as they are, and must needs be, in America.” As was his wont, Hawthorne repeated, almost verbatim, the definition of romance in “The Custom-House” as something that takes place “between the real world and fairy-land,” and Rome is that place.
It’s also a rotting corpse, which suggests, by implication, the death of romance.
Hawthorne had used the image of the corpse before, not just in his notebook entries but in The House of the Seven Gables, where Holgrave wails that the past sits on the present like a giant’s dead body. In that book, however, the past inhabits the present in a predictable, almost orderly fashion: the misdeeds of one generation creating havoc in the next and, obversely, Holgrave reincarnating the best of Matthew Maule. Rome is different; it’s a “casual sepulchre,” streets piled with “continually recurring misfortunes” stacked on top of one another willy-nilly and depressing even to the most adroit storyteller—like Hawthorne—who encounters a “heap of broken rubbish”—his term, not Eliot’s—wherever he looks. Meaninglessness lurks in every fallen column, chipped statue, dim fresco, all “far gone towards nothingness.” Art is nothing but a “crust of paint over an emptiness,” and a “pit of blackness … lies beneath us, everywhere”: thoughts of a brain in a dry season.
No matter how one reads The Marble Faun—and there are myriad ways to analyze it—its author seems distraught and depressed. Conscious that he hasn’t “appeared before the Public,” as he puts it, in seven or eight years, Hawthorne is aware that much has changed. He has changed; it has changed. And he knows he must match or exceed his previous novels, as Washington Irving had bluntly said; it’s the curse of a popular author. But he felt old and tired. He constantly complained of languor or ennui. “It is strange that, when he never was ill before in his life, he should suffer so much from colds, &c., in Italy,” Ada Shepard remarked. He lied about his age. Applying for his Italian passport in 1857, he gave it as fifty-one—he was then fifty-three—and Sophia’s as forty-two; she was forty-eight.
Earlier in life, Hawthorne had taken solace in nature. No more; the sky is unattainable, and though the Alban Mountains stand far from “all this decay and change,” as he writes in The Marble Faun’s opening chapter, they don’t compensate for the depredations of time. “We all of us, as we grow older, lose somewhat of our proximity to Nature,” rationalizes Kenyon. “It is the price we pay for experience.” Another character, disillusioned, disagrees. Experience teaches nothing. Nature teaches nothing. “ ‘The sky itself is an old roof, now,’ answered the Count; ‘and, no doubt the sins of mankind have made it gloomier than it used to be.’ ”
Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and the Count of Monte Beni, a.k.a. Donatello: Hawthorne uses the four characters to structure this long, discursive book. The first and last chapters bear their four names, as if to say that events in between have changed all of them. Regardless, there is something abstract about the novel, something inert: too much change amounts to stasis, it seems; and so it is with character, like that androgynous faun carved in marble.
Modeled loosely on William Story, the man of marble, cold and stiff, is Kenyon, the American sculptor who anchors the novel’s plot but, except for his occasional moralizing, isn’t much of a force within it. Although he wishes to “climb heights and stand on the verge of them,” Kenyon is an artist without style, locked into a moral code and afraid to take a risk. Rather, Donatello, the young Count of Monte Beni, takes the plunge—or, more literally, initiates his own inevitable fall into experience, having left a Tuscan home “guiltless of Rome” and come to the Eternal City, where he falls in love with the mysterious, guilt-ridden Miriam.
Said to look remarkably like the Faun of Praxiteles, Donatello is at the outset of the novel a prelapsarian creature of sensuality, mirth, amiability, and warmth, and seems to share with the mythical faun a heritage “neither man nor animal, and yet not monster, but a being in whom both races meet, on friendly ground!” In fact, according to local legend, Donatello’s first Monte Beni ancestor was a sylvan creature, the sensual child of nature like Donatello. No one is quite sure whether Donatello has inherited, among other attributes, the pointy, metonymic ears of his bestial forefather.
It’s clear, however, that Donatello, the living embodiment of Praxiteles’ Faun, represents for Hawthorne a prior, ornery self (his own, perhaps), mixture of pagan and primitive, human and animal; and he represents the Catholicism that Hawthorne associated with Italy and, more specifically, with Italians: simple, passive, affectionate and, at bottom, savage. When Donatello melodramatically heaves Miriam’s antagonist over the Tarpeian Rock, a precipice from which the ancient empire’s traitors were supposedly flung, he is the Italian male that Hawthorne dreads, unpredictable, tempestuous, violent. He is also inversely linked to the man that he kills, a nameless figure from Miriam’s past who initially appears in the novel wearing goatskin breeches. Later this nameless figure wears the penitent brown cowl of a Capuchin monk, and by the book’s end Donatello is similarly dressed.
Sharing Donatello’s crime is the beautiful artist Miriam Schaefer, herself a woman of mixed heritage. No one knows who she is, where she’s from, whether she’s a German princess or an octoroon whose “burning drop of African blood in her veins so affected her with a sense of ignominy, that she relinquished all and fled her country”—an odd and significant choice of parentage linking her directly to contemporary America’s slavery debate. She is associated more specifically with Emma Salomons, a sister-in-law of the lord mayor of London, whom Hawthorne met while dining at the Salomonses’ residence in the spring of 1856. Bennoch later recalled that “he could not keep his eyes off, the beautiful young woman, whispering to him ‘How lovely!’ ”
Here is Hawthorne’s own description of—and reaction to—Emma Salomons:
She was, I suppose, dark, and yet not dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but the purest and finest complexion (without a shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or sickly) that I ever beheld. Her hair was a wonderful deep, raven black, black as night, black as death; not raven black, for that has a shiny gloss, and her’s had not; but it was hair never to be painted, nor described—wonderful hair, Jewish hair.… [L]ooking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old patriarchs, in their maiden or early married days—what Rachel was, when Jacob wooed her seven years, and seven more—what Judith was; for, womanly as she looked, I doubt not she could have slain a man, in a good cause—what Bathsheba was; only she seemed to have no sin in her—perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to eat the apple. I never should have thought of touching her, nor desired to touch her; for, whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that she was a Jewess or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance, simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature.
Immediately repulsed by the woman who attracts him, Hawthorne again recoils from his own desire, and once again desire, repugnance, fear, and, in this case, a dash of anti-Semitism infuse his portrait of dark-haired beauties like Hester and Zenobia who seduce and terrify their creator; women who look provocatively like his mother and his sister Ebe; women who speak with the force of a Margaret Fuller; and beautiful women, he writes in The Marble Faun, “such as one sees only two or three, if even so many, in all a lifetime; so beautiful, that she seemed to get into your consciousness and memory, and could never afterwards be shut out, but haunted your dreams, for pleasure or for pain.”
Miriam, her latest incarnation, is exotic, different. Across her face falls “a Jewish aspect; a complexion in which there was no roseate bloom, yet neither was it pale.” As Hawthorne copied the remainder of Miriam’s description from his notebooks, he rendered her into his femme fatale: Miriam sketches Jael driving the nail through Sisera and Judith holding the head of Holofernes. “Over and over again,” notes the narrator of The Marble Faun, “there was the idea of woman, acting the part of a revengeful mischief toward man.” But naturally, like Hester and Zenobia before her, Miriam is also Hawthorne himself: artist, criminal, outsider.
Pursued by a grim demon—a father figure of some kind, her conscience, or the residue of a sorrowful past—Miriam, in Hawthorne’s moral economy, bears as much responsibility for the murder as the passionate Donatello. “I did what your eyes bade me to do,” Donatello accuses her after he murders her stalker. Miriam cannot deny that she wished her demon dead. In this, she is associated with Beatrice Cenci, the tragic sixteenth-century murderess of her incestuous father, a woman “fallen and yet sinless,” as Hawthorne had described her when looking at the portrait of her, attributed to Guido Reni, in the Barberini Palace.
Beatrice Cenci, portrait attributed to Guido Reni (Author's collection)
Slender and brown-haired, girlish-looking and sometimes strikingly beautiful, Hilda is Miriam’s obverse, an American in Rome who dwells in a medieval tower on the Via Portoghese, where, quite like a virgin high priestess, she tends the local shrine that sits atop the battlement. There, a lamp illumines the Madonna’s image and, according to Hawthorne, must at all costs stay lit or the tower will become the property of the Catholic Church. But if Hilda sleeps in a dovecote high above the jumbled ruin of Rome, she moves through the city with Hatty Hosmer’s insouciance—though one friend of Hosmer’s friends tartly remarked he could not fancy her “with doves and a pet Madonna.”
An optimistic idealist like Sophia, Hilda is too humble and loyal, we are told, to consider herself on a par with great artists or, presumably, even minor ones. As a consequence, she is a copyist content, like Sophia, to reproduce sections of the works of the Old Masters and subsist on reflected glory. But she is talented. Every artist and souvenir-monger in Rome wants to copy the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; only Hilda reproduces its solitary despair. Hilda, however, will condemn Beatrice—how could a murderess, even if an incest victim, be guiltless?—and in so doing slashes Miriam with a morality-wielding innocence that, says Miriam, cuts “like a sharp steel sword.” Innocence without experience is an impossible taskmaster; Hilda is a prig.
In this, Hilda resembles Una, whose brittle high-mindedness often troubled her parents. A reserved young woman with “a great horror of very demonstrative people,” Una by her own admission set her standards high, so high that her mother had expressed concern for the “ideal which it will take the angels to satisfy.” Unafraid and unmolested—that is, until she witnesses the crime at the heart of the novel—Hilda, again like Una, confronts not a crime per se but the scourge of illness which robs her of her youth—or her father the illusion of her infinite girlhood. And so like Una, Hilda suffers her own painful confrontation with experience, grief, and death, finding temporary succor in the Catholic confessional—this time like Hawthorne, who once noted in its presence that “if I had had a murder on my conscience or any other great sin, I think I should have been inclined to kneel down there.”
He decides against it.
On the edge of her own moral precipice, Hilda smugly declaims, “I am a daughter of the Puritans,” and safely binds herself to the Anglo-Saxon Kenyon, content to “live and die in—the pure, white light of Heaven!” For Kenyon has long loved Hilda, and Hilda can set him straight. At novel’s end, Kenyon wonders if sin is merely an element of human education, a fortunate fall. With transcendental speed and sureness, Hilda answers that such an idea mocks all religious and moral law, destroying “whatever precepts of Heaven are written deepest within us.” Kenyon backs off. He’s just a lost and lonely man, he replies, far from home, who needs Hilda to guide him hither.
Though she’s shrugged it off for most of the novel, Hilda evidently accepts his suit. The couple decides to return to America while Miriam, a female penitent behind a veil, stands at a distance from these happy Anglo-Saxons. Donatello has disappeared, either into the pit of Roman justice or to a monastery. Of his future or Miriam’s, who knows?
And so the novel ends. “Hilda had a hopeful soul, and saw sunlight on the mountain-tops,” the narrator concludes.
One can almost hear him snicker.
Hawthorne’s completed novel swims against its most pious nostrums. Of course, the surface of The Marble Faun aims to please. Perhaps to fill up George Smith’s stipulation that he produce three volumes, Hawthorne included long passages of description that the novel’s critics found distracting, undigested, or downright boring. The Westminster Review said it had the flavor of a newsletter sent to the American public. Nonetheless, not even a month after its English publication, the book entered a third printing, and in Leipzig the publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz reprinted a popular illustrated edition of Transformation for the German market. Pretty soon sightseers to Rome were packing it into their carpetbags.
James Russell Lowell roundly praised the book as Christian parable. The Boston Daily Courier called Hawthorne a Yankee Aeschylus, the New York Times (which didn’t like the book) called him Paracelsus, and Edwin Whipple, in a retrospective of Hawthorne’s career, claimed that if Hawthorne had written nothing else, The Marble Faun alone would rank him among the masters of English composition. The New-York Tribune thought Hilda “the loveliest type of American womanhood,” though when Henry Fothergill Chorley in the Athenaeum wrote she was Phoebe’s cousin, Sophia curtly rapped his knuckles.
Regardless, Hawthorne irritated readers by leaving the conclusion of his novel deliberately vague. The ending was cloudy, inconclusive, uncertain, and even Henry Bright accused it of “a want of finish.” Who was the man hunting Miriam, and for what ancient crime? Why does Hilda disappear after delivering a packet to the Palazzo Cenci? Why does she resurface during the Carnival? What happens to Miriam and Donatello? Do they marry, and how many children did they have, Sophia mimicked the stupid critics.
“How easy it is to explain mysteries,” Hawthorne replied, “when the author does not more wisely choose to keep a veil over them.” He did, however, add a postscript in the second English edition of the book, although he insisted that his own ending “was one of its essential excellencies that it left matters so enveloped in a fog.” He wasn’t joking. As he had indicated in his notes to “The Ancestral Footstep,” he wanted a conclusion “not satisfactory to the natural yearnings of novel-readers,” and, what’s more, in the final chapter of The Marble Faun he had pointed out that “the actual experience of even the most ordinary life is full of events that never explain themselves; either as regards their origin or their tendency.”
Like Rome, then, The Marble Faun is a series of fragments, intentionally so: “The charm lay partly in their very imperfection; for this is suggestive,” writes Hawthorne, “and sets the imagination at work; whereas, the finished picture, if a good one, leaves the spectator nothing to do, and, if bad, confuses, stupefies, disenchants, and disheartens him.” Plotline and character and rumination and guidebook are shored against one another—not just like an unfinished picture but also like the body parts strewn throughout the novel, statues without noses, skulls, a model of Hilda’s hand, and the headless Venus discovered in the Campagna. For Hawthorne writes of flotsam and waste as well as imagination, the latter a sign of hope, like nature. But the rubbish of Rome, history stacked high and ringed by Roman fever, is an emblem of grinding, incessant decay.
So too writing: “The very dust of Rome is historic, and inevitably settles on our page, and mingles with our ink,” Hawthorne observes. In a chapter cagily called “Fragmentary Sentences,” the narrator says he, as writer, pieces together as best he can those ephemeral, unknown, uncertain things—feelings, conversations, human desire—all slated for extinction.
In weaving these mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we undertake a task resembling, in its perplexity, that of gathering up and piecing together the fragments of a letter, which has been torn and scattered to the winds. Many words of deep significance—many entire sentences, and those possibly the most important ones—have flown too far, on the winged breeze, to be recovered.
“I really put what strength I have into many parts of this book,” Hawthorne told James Fields. Acknowledging its grim modernity as no reviewer could, he sighed, “The devil himself always seems to get into my inkstand, and I can only exorcise him by pensfull at a time.”
Writing as restoration, memorialization, and a defense against ruin: these are doomed to failure. And that, finally, is the lesson of Rome.
The Marble Faun is Hawthorne’s last completed novel.