The Marble Faun [Paperback]

It seems a little padded with descriptions of Roman architecture and festivals and the like, but the story is a good one, and the mysteries involved kept me reading through the slower parts to the end. All in all, it is very much worth reading.

Miriam, a creative painter, Hilda, a talented copyist, and Kenyon, a gifted sculptor, are all Americans. Donatello is a young Italian count who has befriended them all, but is besotted with Miriam. The faun of the title is a sculpture known as the Faun of Praxiteles. Donatello so closely resembles the statue that the friends kiddingly decide they must see Donatello's ears (normally covered by his hair) to see if they are pointed like the faun's.

Most of the other mysteries in the story are resolved at the end of the book, but we never do get to see Donatello's ears.

Since mine is the first review of this edition of The Marble Faun I would advise the reader to read reviews of other editions as well. I found the book to be uninteresting and difficult to read fully and tended to scan much of it. Hawthorne is one of the greatest American novelists and his place in fiction is well established with The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, but this work falls far short, in my view, of these works.

One problem is that much of the book is talky and descriptive rather than focusing on the story itself. The chapter titles give an indication of this circumstance: "Miriam's Studio," The Suburban Villa," "A Stroll on the Pincian, "A Scene on the Corso." The descriptions of ancient Rome and the events and culture of the city ("Market Day in Perugia" and the description of the Carnival) may be interesting to some readers. Furthermore the style of speaking is stilted, the characters talking as if they were part of a Shakespearean drama rather than Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. It is also unrealistic that the four characters keep running into each other by chance in a city as large as Rome.

The plot is very simple. Four young people are in Rome. Three are American artists; Miriam and Hilda are painters and Kenyon is a sculptor. The fourth person is a young Italian Count, Donatello. Donatello is a happy-go-lucky handsome fellow who the other three compare to a statue of a marble faun at the beginning of the book. The couples pair off with Miriam and Donatello forming one pair and Kenyon and Hilda the other. But then a terrible thing happens. The four friends go for a stroll and climb a lane leading to a palace with a parapet on the edge of a steep precipice. After a while Kenyon and Hilda leave, but Hilda turns back to wait for Miriam. Miriam and Donatello are standing by the parapet talking. Miriam talks about "Men whose lives were the bane of their fellow creatures. Men who poisoned the air...for their own selfish purposes. There was short work with such men on old Roman times." At this point a man came toward Miriam who became filled with despair and apparently falls to her knees. Donatello reacts quickly and hurls the figure over the parapet to his death below. The horror-stricken Miriam asks, "What have you done?" to which the now raging Donatello replies, " I did what ought to be done to a traitor. I did what your eyes bade me to do when I asked them with mine as I held the wretch over the precipice!" Hilda, who had just come back, witnesses the fatal act.

Why does Donatello commit this crime? Since he is strong enough to pick up the man and throw him over a wall, he surely could have taken him by the scruff of the neck and led him away from Miriam. The reason seems to be that Hawthorne is concerned with the idea of The Fall of Man. Miriam plays the part of the temptress, Eve with Donatello assaying the role of Adam. The book is infused with religion, particularly Hawthorne's take on Christianity so amply displayed in The Scarlet Letter. In fact, Hilda is described as a Puritan from New England. Miriam's fear of the man is not explained at the time, but is revealed later in the book that he is someone who loves her obsessively and whom she has rejected.

The murder changes the behavior of all four characters, especially Miriam, Donatello and Hilda. Miriam and Donatello go about in various disguises and with a general mood of sadness and depression. Hilda seeks consolation in a Catholic church where a priest refuses to hear her confession since she is not of that faith. Hawthorne's own take on religion may be found in the attitude of Kenyon. On page 286 he and Hilda are talking. Hilda asks if Donatello was really a faun--an innocent, carefree young man. Kenyon replies, "He perpetrated a great crime; and his remorse, gnawing into his soul has awakened it; developing a thousand high capabilities, moral and intellectual, which we never should have dreamed of asking for, within the scanty compass of the Donatello whom we knew. Sin has educated Donatello, and elevated him...Did Adam fall, that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier paradise than his?" Hilda is shocked by this rely: "Do not you perceive what a mockery your creed makes, not only of all religious sentiments, but of moral law--and how it annuls and obliterates whatever precepts of Heaven are written deepest within us? You have shocked me beyond words!"

The novel ends with an unusual postscript with the author entering the story and talking with Hilda and Kenyon, claiming that he does so only after many readers demanded further explanations of the mysteries of the story. Hawthorne supplies this explanation and a conclusion that is as unrealistic as much of the novel.

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