NO EASY HOPE & NO SIMPLE CONSOLATION

”It was just before leaving Rome that Hawthorne conceived the idea of a romance in which the “Faun” of Praxiteles should come to life, and play a characteristic part in the modern world; the catastrophe naturally resulting from his coming into conflict with a social organization for which he was unfitted.”

All roads lead to Rome. At least many literary ones.This despite Rome offering no easy hope or simple consolation, nor shortcut to escape the pervasive guilt. The city has always attracted writers who have mourned of its fall and complained about its decadence, but they have never stopped coming. Most writers found to their surprise that they came to experience more sorrow over Rome’s life than they did over its death. They loved the ruins, but almost everything else tended to shock them; the found the Romans decadent, the shopkeepers avaricious, the aristocrats snobbish, the children diseased and the fleas healthy.

''Considered one of the creepiest places in Rome, the Crypt of the Capuchins is made up of several tiny rooms, decorated with the bones of over 4,000 Capuchin monks and poor Romans. Because the soil in the crypt was brought from Jerusalem, many of the friars who died between 1528 and 1870 wanted to be buried here.''

”I have seldom or never spent so wretched a time anywhere,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne during his first days in Rome. ”The atmosphere certainly has a peculiar quality of malignity.” The streets were ”indescribably ugly,” …sour bread…enormous prices for poor living; beggars, pickpockets, ancient temples and broken monuments…a shabby population, smoking bad cigars.” Hawthorne considered Rome dirty, as many Americans did, and he wondered ”whether the ancient Romans were as unclean a people as we wverywhere find those who have succeeded them.”

Hawthorne arrived in the city in February of 1858, having come to Italy for the sake of the health of his wife and daughter. He was immediately attacked not only by flu but by the fleas for which the city was famous. Even though he huddled by the fire in his room with all his coats on, he was unable to get warm. There were no ”great logs of a New England forest to burn” in ROme, he observed sadly. Occasionally he went to St. Peter’s which was the only place he could find that was not too cold. But he rarely went out.

''The bones in the six-room crypt represent over 4,000 individual monks. It is said monks fled the French Revolution (1793-94) and took refuge at the Church in Roma. There are many theories about the arrangment of the bones, but most stories end with the notion that the anonymous artist reaped his heavenly reward. One tale says that a French Capuchins did the work, no doubt mimicing the catacombs of Paris. The Marquis de Sade visited the crypt in 1775 and described it as "An example of funerary art worthy of an English mind", created "by a German priest who lived in this house."

However, as the climate changed, he became happier. ”I am very glad I have seen the pope,” he wrote at the end of March, ”because now he may be crossed out of the list of sights to be seen.” The list of sights was enormous, and, according to the customs of the time, Hawthorne and his wife added to it the studios of painters and the sculptors working there. They sought out Browning’s friend William Wetmore Story, whose apartments in the Palazzo Barberini were a center for American artists and writers in Rome. Among those who visited Story were Ralph Waldo Emerson and that original Boston bluestocking, Margaret Fuller; the lady abolitionists Julia Ward Howe and Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Hawthorne crossed paths with none of these literary compatriots, but he did encounter the poet William Cullen Bryant. The two men spent an evening together, discussing Bleeding Kansas.

''As the number of bodies grew, it became clear that the only way to accommodate all of them was to dig up the buried skeletons and hang the bones on the walls of the crypt. Various bones are nailed on the walls and ceiling and there are even some skeletons dressed in monk robes.''

Although Hawthorne was too preoccupied to work while he was in Rome, because of the mortal illness of his daughter Una, he did think of ideas for two stories. One was inspired by a macabre newspaper report about a widower who had had his late wife’s ashes chemically resolved into stone, which he had set in a ring; Hawthorne’s sentimental protagonist would present the ring as a bridal gift to his next spouse. The second story became ”The Marble Faun” . Its theme is certainly less ghoulish, yet the novel does evoke the ”peculiar quality of malignity” the author found in Rome.

A climactic scene is set in the Cemetery of the Capuchins, one of Rome’s more sensational tourist sites where the walls are adorned with the skulls of monks who have departed to dwell in the City of God. Since the hero of ”The Marble Faun” had killed a sinister Capuchin who was plaguing the heroine, the exigencies of nineteenth century fiction required that he and his lady visit the cemetery where the remains of the victim would soon lie.

um, Rome, of Praxiteles' Resting Satyr. Photo and cast from Norwich Free Academy's Slayter Casts Collection, Norwich, Connecticut.''" width="325" height="570" />

''A plaster cast of the 5 /12 foot marble Roman copy (the so-called "Marble Faun") in the Capitoline Museum, Rome, of Praxiteles' Resting Satyr. Photo and cast from Norwich Free Academy's Slayter Casts Collection, Norwich, Connecticut.''

Most of ”The Marble Faun”  is set in Rome, and the book was written shortly after Hawthorne left the city. It is surprising that he survived to write it at all; when he departed, he records, the servants who had waited on his family ”cursed us plentifully, wishing that we might never come to our journey’s end, and that we might all break our necks or die of apoplexy , the most awful curse that an Italian knows …it precludes the possibility of extreme unction.”

There have been few other writers of dark, morbid, surrealistic fiction who are as warm and humane as Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Marble Faun  displays a great deal of empathy for the isolation and estrangement of the characters on the story. From Poe to Kafka, from Melville to Sebald, alienation and the uncanny have usually come  in chilling and unwelcome doses, an emotional frigidity that questions not only the nature of human relationships but even the possibility of them. However, The Marble Faun is a story about alienated friends and lovers, who are eventually drawn closer to each other by the very coldness that has separated them during their heightened, trancelike experiences. The Marble Faun was published in 1860, and it’s very different from anything in Hawthorne’s famous earlier novels. It deals with expatriates in Rome, and is generally considered the start of the “Americans in Europe” genre that Henry James would later develop.

The novel is surreal largely because Hawthorne sees the world with disorienting vividness: There is a singular effect, oftentimes, when out of the midst of engrossing thought and deep absorption, we suddenly look up, and catch a glimpse of external objects. We seem, at such moments, to look farther and deeper into them, than by premeditated observation; it is as if they met our eyes alive, and with all their hidden meaning on the surface, but grew again inanimate and inscrutable, the instant that they become aware of our glances.

Rubens. The Union of Earth and Water. ''While Rubens was in Rome he must have been impressed not only by its fountains but also by its marble copy of Praxiteles' Resting Satyr, for he later merged the two in a painting of 1618, The Union of Earth and Water. Impressed by the satyr's languid pose and soft, ripe, feminine form, he turned him into a zaftig Rubinesque woman, flipped her over to lean in the opposite direction, and replaced the satyr's flute with the hand of trident-wielding Neptune - shown here in the guise of a Roman river god, with his watery essence flowing out of an overturned jar, as a Triton blows his horn and putti gambol in the water.''

Hawthorne catches his characters at the moments when they “look farther and deeper” into their surroundings, and then at the opposite moments when they feel everything grow “inanimate and inscrutable.” He is masterful at describing the psychology of guilt, the texture that despair can give to every detail. As part of this texture, he also excels at showing how the same street or statue or room can mean different things to different people at different times. Often the settings and the characters seem to seep into each other, merging and then coming apart.

The story revolves around a murder and its impact on the four main characters. Two American artists – the sculptor Kenyon and the copyist Hilda – become friends with the painter Miriam and a young Italian man, Donatello. Characteristically, Hawthorne describes Miriam, the novel’s heroine, as a walking illusion: She resembled one of those images of light, which conjurors evoke and cause to shine before us, in apparent tangibility, only an arm’s length beyond our grasp; we make a step in advance, expecting to seize the illusion, but find it still precisely so far out of reach.

Nearly everything about Miriam’s past is unknown, and many important questions about her remain unanswered at the novel’s end. She has taken up a new identity in Rome after some unspecified involvement in some obscure crime. Hawthorne refuses to ever clear up the mystery, and pretends at one critical point not to know what Miriam is discussing with a monk who has started to follow her around the city.

Guido Reni - "Beatrice Cenci"

Eventually, Donatello kills this monk because he thinks the man is persecuting Miriam and deserves to die. The murder – as impulsive and ambiguous as Billy Budd’s murder of Claggart – sets in motion the novel’s vision of guilt and despair passing from one person to another. Anticipating The Brothers Karamazov, Hawthorne creates a situation where everyone ultimately feels responsible for the murder, and where guilt spreads so wide and deep that nobody remains innocent.

Hawthorne traces the course of this guilt as it moves through the characters. The Marble Faun uses many of the techniques we find in self-consciously experimental fiction: unexpected time shifts, deliberately misleading narration, elaborate literary references, labyrinthine ambiguities, a constant awareness of conflicting viewpoints. It’s essential that the history of Miriam’s earlier guilt remain unclear, for instance, because this is how she experiences the past – she’s no longer able to say where her innocence ends and her responsibility begins. Similarly, Hilda develops a bizarre sense of complicity in the monk’s murder, even though all she did was witness it from a distance.

George Peter Alexander Healy Born 1813, Boston, Massachusetts Died 1894, Chicago, Illinois Frederic E. Church Born 1826, Hartford, Connecticut Died 1900, New York, New York Jervis McEntee Born 1826, Rondout, New York Died 1891, Kingston, New York The Arch of Titus, 1871 Oil on canvas Bequest of Dr. J. Ackerman Coles, 1926 26.1260

The paradox of The Marble Faun is that it’s the most nihilistic of Hawthorne’s books at the same time as it’s the warmest and most sympathetic. The characters work their way towards each other through their worst encounters with desolation and self-doubt. As Melville recognized, Hawthorne is one of the great writers of negation. He is peerless at dramatizing darkness and loneliness and evil. Everyone in The Marble Faun becomes lost, wandering in destructive and hopeless alienation. Each character suffers from “an insatiable instinct that demands friendship, love, and intimate communication, but is forced to pine in empty forms; a hunger of the heart, which finds only shadows to feed upon.”

The novel offers no easy hope, no simple consolation. Miriam never escapes her guilt. Donatello goes to prison. Hilda’s doubts about her innocence and the darkness of the world stay with her forever. Yet the final paradox is that all the characters come together in their loneliness, and are united in their separation. They still have “only shadows to feed upon,” but they know this about each other, and they do their best to see beyond their individual tragedies and to share whatever comfort they can.

Hawthorne loves them for this, and loves them for salvaging their humanity even after they’ve been broken by their nightmarish personal failures, and by the wild, irrational malevolence that haunts all the story’s events. The Marble Faun is intellectually rigorous in its refusal to surrender to the temptations of sentimentality, and emotionally rigorous in its even stronger refusal to surrender to the temptations of cynicism and despair.

Turner returned to the subject of Italy throughout his career. This painting, Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino, was made in 1839.

”At the end of the romance, her dearest friends seem finally to have seen a part of her secret life, fragments of which were there from the very beginning. Early on, “suggesting a “certain rich Oriental character in her face” (p. 22), Hawthorne hints that Miriam is Jewish. Significantly, though, she is not described physically until several chapters later when she shows Donatello her self-portrait as Rachael amid the other drawings of Old Testament Jewish heroines-Jael and Judith-who used their beauty and sexuality to attract and assassinate Jewish oppressors. All this confirms Hawthorne’s contention “that woman must strike through her own heart to reach a human life, whatever the motive that impelled her” (p. 44). He illustrates this pronouncement with another of Miriam’s sketches, that of Salome receiving the head of John the Baptist, undermining the heroic, patriotic actions of Jael and Judith through an allusion to the New Testament’s dancing temptress. Salome’s infamous actions reflect the Christian paradigm of feminine evil-the use of sexuality and the lust it provoked in Herod to behead the Baptist-the progenitor of the Catholic practice of conversion itself.

''Calvinist collectors in the Dutch Republic were often especially interested in Old Testament paintings, as Calvin has advocated careful study of the biblical narrative. Jan Victors, who painted mostly Old Testament scenes, apparently made them primarily for Calvinist patrons. His large pictures of Old Testament subjects are distinctly related to Rembrandt's biblical pictures done after the mid-thirties; his paintings of tradesmen and rural genre scenes are more personal. In this scene the Jewish heroine Esther, wife of the Persian King Ahasuerus, notifies her husband of the plans of his advisor Haman, here seen at left, who has schemed to massacre the Jews in the Persian empire.''

What Judith, Jael, and Salome have in common is that they are Jewish women who seem fearless in using their sexuality for political ends. They are all (even Salome) heroines of the Jewish cause. For Hawthorne, though, they violate “the idea of woman, acting the part of a revengeful mischief towards man” (p. 44), also expressed in Miriam’s art through her drawings of “domestic and common scenes” (p. 45), signifying the proper realm of women serving as lovers, brides, and mothers. In each, Miriam’s figure is seen peeping out in the background “with an expression of deep sadness” (p. 46), longing, we might imagine, for the domestic bliss evoked symbolically in her portrait of Rachael, wooed by Jacob and destined to become the quintessential Jewish wife/mother of the Old Testament, whose male offspring will lead a nation of people.

Artist: Caravaggio Date: 1599 Incident shown: Judith has steeled herself to cut into Holofernes' neck, using his own sword. The maid Abra stands ready to catch the severed head when it falls away. Bible reference: Judith 13:7-8 Comment: Caravaggio has painted a magnificent Holofernes, muscled, strong, powerful. His horrified face is the attention-grabbing focus of this picture. Judith, on the other hand, slices his neck with a look of mild distaste, as if she is carving the Sunday roast.

Furthermore, Miriam projects her own features into her portrait of Rachael, offering Hawthorne his first opportunity to unveil Miriam’s “Jewish aspect”: “if she were really of Jewish blood, then this was Jewish hair, and a dark glory such as crowns no Christian maiden’s head” (p. 48). In her art, Miriam offers overt signs of a suppressed, Jewish identity that remains in spite of Catholic conversion. Hawthorne still wonders if Miriam “might ripen to be what Judith was, when she vanquished Holofernes with her beauty, and slew him for too much adoring it.” ( Augustus M. Kolich )