"A Daughter of the Puritans": History in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun

Abstract

rTO say that Nathaniel Hawthorne was concerned with American history is to risk belaboring the obvious. Hawthorne's use of the Puritan past in many of his early tales and in The Scarlet Letter has been amply documented; though critics may disagree about his attitude toward Puritanism, no one seriously questions the importance of history in the shaping of those early works. At the same time, however, Hawthorne is often perceived as placing less emphasis on history in his fiction after The House of the Seven Gables, and studies of Hawthorne's use of history generally have little to say about either The Blithedale Romance or The Marble Faun. Such silence is understandable: The Marble Faun in particular is set in nineteenth-century Italy and contains few direct references to the Puritan past. Nevertheless, American history is as much an issue in The Marble Faun as it is in The Scarlet Letter. Indeed, I will argue here that Hawthorne developed a consistent and complex view of history throughout his career and that his portrayal of Hilda, the heroine of The Marble Faun, represents a final commentary on the course he believed American history should take. The romance as a whole defines the difference between American history, which has created this spotless daughter of the Puritans, and Old World history, which is illustrated in the fall and redemption of Donatello. To understand this difference, we must begin with a look at the way Hawthorne's contemporaries viewed history and the way Hawthorne adapted that view in his fiction. Such background will help us to appreciate both Hilda's relation to her Puritan predecessors and, ultimately, the reasons for her un-