5/9/2023 0 Comments Hawthorne the marble faun![]() ![]() ![]() At a crucial moment he commits a murder that causes him to reexperience Adam’s fall from grace. “Donatello” is established early on as a prototype of innocent and happy prelapsarian man. A far cry from The Scarlet Letter, perhaps, yet Hawthorne’s allegorizing purpose remains strong as ever. The book is a feast of sensory imagery, attaining a sacramental significance at times and at others simply basking in an aestheticism reminiscent of the world of the Pre-Raphaelites. The novel’s characters include three expatriate American artists and their Italian friend, “Donatello,” who resembles the mythical faun in an ancient statue. While in The Marble Faun he remains very much the moralist, he travels far afield from his New England roots to Rome, to other towns and countryside of Italy, and into the world of art and Catholic Christianity. ![]() We know Hawthorne best as a psychologist of sin who looked at his Puritan heritage from an oblique and critical angle. Nathaniel Hawthorne classed The Marble Faun, his last novel, among his “romances,” works of fiction blending fantasy with moral allegory. In “The Marble Faun,” we sense Nathaniel Hawthorne, descendent of Puritans, coming to terms with what some call the “Catholic Thing,” transcending the assumptions of his own culture and society in an open-minded reflection on history and art. ![]()
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