The Marble Faun
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The fragility and durability of human life and art dominated this history of American immigrants in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. After befriending Donatello, Miriam, Hilda and Kenyon, a young Italian with the classic complexity of the Marble Faun, find her desire for art that takes an ominous turn as Miriam's unhappy past turns the present into a tragedy. Hawthorne's "International Novel" dramatizes the conflict between the Old World and the New World and the vague connection between the "authentic" and the "wrong" in life as well as in art. Exciting descriptions of the author's classic locations have made the Marble Faun a favorite guide to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this invaluable symbolic novel is both a story of murder and a parable about the Fall of Man. When the characters find their marital existence disturbed by the terrible effects of momentum, Hawthorne forces his readers to question the value of art and culture and turns to a major evolutionary debate that begins to shake up Victorian society.
