Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  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 su
it. 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Between Two Countries

  The years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by-and-by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

  As SOON AS he settled in Concord in the summer of 1860, Hawthorne was pining for England, cold, drizzly, fog-laden England, the place he’d once called, in a fit of distemper, beer-soaked and sodden.

  Hawthorne recognized what a gift his tenancy had been. “The sweetest thing connected with a foreign residence is,” he told Ticknor, “that you have no rights and no duties, and can live your own life without interference of any kind.” Yet before leaving John Bull, he ached for America so bitterly, said Sophia, that he couldn’t work for thinking of it.

  America: that was the place he described in the preface to The Marble Faun as a country “where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.”

  No gloomy wrong? No shadow? Mary Mann took exception. “How could he say in his beautiful preface that his country had no wrong to mourn over?” What about slavery? And why doesn’t he write about it? “I hope the time will come when he will use his wizard’s pen in our holy cause,” Mary prodded Sophia, “for I think no country ever presented such a subject for literature, and with his power of representing the action of conscience, he might be almost the besom of destruction to Slavery.”

  Hawthorne preferred not to, although the days of sweet immunity were decidedly numbered.

  Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody (especially the latter) had been plying their sister with long letters about the odium of slavery. “I wholly and utterly abominate slavery,” Sophia hotly defended herself against the implicit criticism. “I disagree, however, with those who would abolish it with a civil war or any evil deed whatever—and I believe GOD will not smile on any violence, for its good intention.”

  In 1857 a Missouri slave, Dred Scott, sued for his freedom, arguing all the way to the Supreme Court that his residence in free states or territories had made him free. In a stunning 7–2 decision, the Court ruled that blacks were nothing more than property and as such had no rights of citizenship, meaning they could not petition the courts; and it declared unconstitutional all congressional acts excluding slavery from the territories, meaning that slavery might exist anywhere it wanted. A staggering blow to Free-Soil and antislavery activists, the decision deepened the rift in the Democratic Party and strengthened the palm of the Republicans, who looked forward with some hope to the next round of elections.

  Mary Mann received a letter from Sophia seeming to praise Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision. Horrified, Mann attacked. Sophia parried. “Because I suggested that he might have decided according to his conscience, you think, I advocate him and his decision,” she replied; her only concession: “I m
ay have said or perhaps have thought in my letters that it may have been intended by Providence that the inferior race were designed to serve the superior—But not as slaves! ”

  Though unremitting, Sophia’s racism was not exceptional. By and large, northern Democrats and many Republicans wishing to abolish slavery were not comfortable with the consequences. Debating Stephen Douglas for a seat in the Senate, Abraham Lincoln himself had reminded audiences that he had “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races.” Emancipation would produce an irreparable sectional split or, worse yet, amalgamation. “You surely must know that there are advocates of amalgamation, & also that there are abolitionists who uphold that the black race is virtually equal to the white,” Sophia reminded Elizabeth. “I did not suppose you did either, and I was wondering how anyone could.”

  Sophia, more than her husband, feared a multiracial society; likely Hawthorne feared it, and so did Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody, who, to their credit, considered slavery atrocious enough to risk it. And they hoped to recruit the Hawthornes to the holy cause, still convinced that Pierce, the knave, had warped Hawthorne’s judgment—“You always speak as if he were an ignorant baby and very weak,” Sophia reproved Mary—and that Hawthorne had overmastered hers. “My husband meddles with my ideas no more than the stars,” Sophia insisted.

  But meddling was what they did. Each of them. Sophia and Nathaniel forbade their children to read newspapers, and of Hawthorne’s novels, Una was not permitted The Scarlet Letter or Blithedale. As for Elizabeth’s wanting to tell Una about the young girls, chained and naked, sold on the block, Sophia emphatically refused. “I have read of those auctions often,” she assured the intemperate Elizabeth, “and even the worst facts were never so bad as absolute nudity.”