The marble faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne

THE MARBLE FAUN
Nathaniel Hawthorne

A critical paper by
June Salm

 

         So what have we here, in this dark and heavy tapestry of a novel, this sort of Gobelin hanging (a Gobelin with a goblin)?

         For one thing we have Italy, and principally Rome, as background and indeed foreground.  Rome in its modern incarnation (that is, Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century modern) – with the bustling life of its populace; its international artists’ colony; its fountains and palazzos and villas; its lush botany; its shabby and fetid alleys.

And we have Rome with its ubiquitous encrustations from the past – in painting and sculpture, in relic and artifact, in architecture partial or whole – the Rome of the Etruscans, and of the pre-holy Romans, and the Rome in which Jesus, punning on St. Peter’s name, said: “Upon this rock I will build my church” – the Rome in which, though Martin Luther dealt it blows, that Church lives powerfully on.

         Against this backdrop, four figures play out linked destinies: Kenyon, Hilda, Miriam, and Donatello.  Kenyon and Hilda, both Americans – he a sculptor, she a painter – have come to Rome to explore and develop their art.  Likewise the painter Miriam, whose past and nationality, however, are veiled in mystery.  She is darkly beautiful; she is exotic.  When we first meet her, it is hinted she may be a Jewess (How exotic can a woman be?). Rounding out this quartet of good friends is Donatello, a comely youth who hails from Tuscany, and is enamored of Miriam.

         One day, on a visit to the Capitol museum in Rome, the group is drawn to the famous statue of a faun by the fourth-century Greek sculptor Praxiteles.  And Miriam observes, with the preternatural perceptiveness so typical of her tribe, that Donatello bears an uncanny likeness to the statue.  Donatello, she declares, is Praxiteles’ Faun, “miraculously softened into flesh and blood.”

         Donatello is very much flesh and blood, but without a lot to show by way of brain, by way of capacity for insight.  Like the part-man, part-goat of mythology, he is, simply, a sportive and unspoiled creature, a child of Nature, unbenighted by civilization and its discontents. He is not likely to sit down of an evening and read Kierkegaard.  Which is why Miriam finds him uninteresting.

         Enter yet another person in the cast of characters – the strange, shaggy man whom Miriam uses as a model in her curtained, almost sunless studio. She paints in oils – and often, as subjects, Biblical women who have perpetrated violence, such as Jael, who killed the leader of the Canaanites (her name, I learned on the Internet, means “mountain goat”); such as Judith who decapitated Holofernes, and Salome who ordered the same for John the Baptist. Over and over in Miriam’s work (as Hawthorne puts it), “there was the idea of woman acting out the part of a revengeful mischief  towards man.”

         But hark, here is a man, here is her Model, who seems poised for mischief towards Miriam!  Like an inescapable shadow he dogs her footsteps, like a snake he slithers after her, above ground  and below.  Once, for instance, when the four friends had descended to Dantean, or is it Dantesque, depths in a catacomb, and Miriam to the alarm of her companions had vanished for a while into its dusk – upon her reappearance, there, flickering in the gloom, was you-know-who: the Model.

         Let us move briefly from darkness to light, or to that which surrounds and emanates from Hilda, Miriam’s dear friend.  An artist Hilda is, yes, but she has given up attempting to create original work, and become instead a fine and admired copyist of the great masters.  Her studio is in a tower high above Rome’s befouled air: a tower topped by a shrine to the Virgin whose eternal flame Hilda literally keeps lit; a tower also topped by a niche from and to which doves make ethereal flight.  The virginal and white-robed Hilda, a daughter of Puritan New England, hears no evil, speaks no evil, sees no evil. Or  tries like the devil not to.  She is, in fact, in her unblemished purity and steadfast good cheer, a polar opposite of the passionate, tempestuous, Miriam, who carries within her the stain of an unnamable sin from the past, and an attendant fierce melancholy.

         What is Miriam’s sin?  Hawthorne circles the subject without ever quite alighting on it.  But the reader, gazing with Miriam and Hilda upon the portrait of Beatrice Cenci that Hilda has copied from Guido’s original (we are also, of course, in the Rome of the Renaissance) begins -- at least I did -- to sniff incest.  For the Beatrice Cenci of legend and perhaps history was raped by her father.  Later, in revenge, she had him murdered, and for that parricide was executed by the papal authority.  Let me confess, dear reader, that with this focus on the unfortunate Beatrice, I began to think that Miriam had been violated by her own father, and that the Model, her grim pursuer, was he.

         Meanwhile between the sunny Hilda and the tormented Miriam is the sculptor Kenyon, who tries to balance things out.  He is interlocutor and observer – and at times a grappler with deep questions about art, and deeper questions about good and evil.  Basically, however, I found him to be a kind of Boy Scout, and a bore.

         The story reaches its black pitch when Miriam and Donatello, on a moonlit stroll through Roman ruins, come to the Tarpeian Rock, from whose height in ancient times traitors were thrown to their deaths.  And where Miriam’s Model, who has been as persistent a presence in her life as her heartbeat, materializes yet again.  He had once told her, leaping like a spectre from a dancing group in a glade at the Villa Borghese, “Our paths cross and are entangled. The threads are twisted into a strong chord, which is dragging us to an evil doom.”  Donatello has long been angered by Miriam’s distress in that shadow’s presence (you might say the Model gets his goat) and now, taking decisive action, pushes him from the cliff.  The sprite Donatello has become executioner.

         We are dealing with large themes here, ladies and gentlemen: overarchingly, it would seem, with Adam’s fall from Paradise, through sin.  And what to me, at least, comes like a new spin on the theme (unacquainted as I am with the history of western theological debate) – that the fall may have been a fortunate one.   Because Donatello, expelled from his Eden, matures into reality.  No longer the innocent semi-child, the carefree creature that is all body and movement, he is at last capable of thought, and with new wisdom sees into the dark underside of things.  Now he is ready for Fear and Trembling; now Miriam is ready to love him.

         But he cannot look at her, so steeped is he in guilt.  And so he returns to Monte Beni, his ancestral home in Tuscany (this Faun, we discover, is a count).  Here Kenyon, who comes as his guest, proves a compassionate companion to the gloomy penitent, and finally, Protestant though he be, guides Donatello to a reunion with Miriam in the Tuscan town of Peruggia, under the benevolent outstretched hand of a statue of Pope Julius the Third.

         Back to Rome we hie, where the friends, forever altered by the murder of Miriam’s doppelganger, meet again.  Hilda the stainless has now laid eyes on sin, having inadvertently witnessed the murder, and notwithstanding her love for Miriam, rejected the latter as complicit in the crime,  Miriam herself is guilt-struck, having been told by Donatello, instantly after the deed, that he did it because a look in her eye bade him to.  And Kenyon wrestles with two matters: one amorous -- a determination to woo Hilda, whom he has long loved; the other moral: a need to sort out the connection between good and evil.  “Here comes my perplexity,” he says to Hilda: “Sin has educated Donatello, and elevated him. Is sin...which we deem such a dreadful blackness in the universe...merely an element...through which we struggle to a higher and purer state?  Did Adam fall, that we might...rise to a...loftier paradise than his?”  Hilda, horrified, exclaims that this would make a mockery of religion and of moral law.  And Kenyon recants, almost as if this were a Stalinist purge trial, admitting that his mind had wandered, and begs, “Oh Hilda, guide me home!”  She does.  They wed, and the two Americans quit Rome for their native land.  Donatello is off to prison. Miriam has departed too, for a place unspecified, to lead a life of solitude and penance, not without first, however, sending a gift to the bride: a bracelet set with seven genuine Etruscan gems.

         Thus a relic of the Old World – the very old world – follows the couple to the New.  One more instance in Hawthorne’s tale of how the past renews itself in eternal cycles, how in myth and memory and visible remains, it encompasses us all.

         I have read little of Hawthorne, except for a couple of short stories (including the fine My Kinsman Major Molineux), and so I can’t place The Marble Faun in the context of what I suppose one would call his oeuvre.  Of The Scarlet Letter,  which I did read in adolescence, seduced as I was by the word “adultery”, I remember only that it failed to provide the sleaze I’d expected.

         Judging Marble Faun, then, as its own thing, and not in relationship to the author’s lifelong literary and personal obsessions, I would give Mr. Hawthorne an A for effort (not adultery), and a grade of C-minus.

         To be sure, he gives us interesting commentary on Italian custom, and noteworthy description of town and country – Rome the town, and Tuscany in its verdant, grape-filled expanse.  There are flashes of vivid phrasing – “the lofty dilapidation of a tomb” is one I relished.  He ponders some of life’s fascinating questions.  He peers, or tries to peer, into the unlit caverns of the human psyche.  He broods, often provocatively, on the visual arts – a major subject of the book – and their connection with time and human experience.  He even (more than a century before Ms. Steinem did) touches on the issue of Woman, praising Rome for granting her liberty which  “is elsewhere confined to much narrower limits”, and suggesting that, if we were to open to women “a wider scope of pursuits and professions”, we “must also remove the shackles of our present conventional rules, which would then become an insufferable restraint on maid or wife.”

         But does it add up to a good novel?

         I think not.

         For this tapestry is full of holes and loose threads.  The plot, which has careened on a crazy course all along, comes at last to an unsatisfying conclusion.  It is revealed, for instance, that Miriam’s demon, the Model, is actually a former fiance from whose menacing coils she had fled.  Further it’s revealed, after his murder, that he had become a Capuchin monk, known to his confreres as Brother Antonio, and beloved for his holiness.  This is not only thrown at the reader too suddenly; it is artistically and novelistically ludicrous.   It’s one of many examples of our author’s repetitious playing at chiaroscuro: here is the black side of the Model, and lo! here’s his holy side; here is the dark tower of Donatello’s castle where he obsesses on his crime; and here from the same castle flows the delectable wine called Sunshine, product of the ancestral vineyard.  And, of course, here is the Catholic Church in its historic and ongoing corruption, but whose stained glass windows suffuse with celestial light, the very Church at whose confessional the sin-burdened soul can unburden -- from which, in fact, Hilda, having revealed to a priest that she beheld a crime, emerges from agony radiant and free.

         Getting back to the plot full of holes: it raises riddles and in the end shuns solutions, leaving the reader twisting slowly in the wind.  Our author attempted to address this in a postscript to a later printing, by responding to readers’ complaints with some answers.  But they are limp and partial.  And tacking them on in this manner is, I’d say, tacky.

         And what of the players in Marble Faun? Aren’t they abysmally uncompelling?  Aren’t they Hawthorne’s own lifeless statues upon which he drapes broad concepts and private muck?  And speaking of women, isn’t Hilda in particular insufferable, with her slender, delicate hands, and unimpeachable ethics, and talking like Elsie Dinsmore?  In fact the stilted dialogue on everyone’s part reminds me of the old New Yorker feature titled “Speeches we doubt ever got spoken.” The characters are forever exclaiming, “Nay!”  I say: “Fie!”

         The title of the novel’s English edition was Transformation, which in addition to Donatello’s from faun to complete man, refers, I assume, to the metamorphosis of clay and marble into sculpture, and paint into painting.  But Hawthorne himself proves incapable of that mysterious alchemy by which a writer transmutes story, character, and a mix of themes into literature.

         We each, as our lives unfold, doubtless hope that those who know us will see us in terms of our virtues rather than our failings, and not just at our funerals when decorum demands it.

         Similarly, I think, an author has the right to be known by his best work.  The Marble Faun, I’m certain, isn’t Hawthorne’s.

         But I, for one, forgive you, Mr. Hawthorne, and pray that other of your books redeem you in the minds of readers and of God.