A Masque of Love and Death

Abstract

Three quarters of a century ago The Marble Faun rivalled The Scarlet Letter in popularity, but it is now the least read of Hawthorne's romances. It used to be admired as an elegant guidebook to Italy, but readers now agree with Henry James that the impression it gives of Italy is "factitious." Parvenu Americans of the Gilded Age relished its comments on Italian art, but these are now deplored as mere decorative embellishments which clog the narrative. Nineteenth-century readers prized The Marble Faun chiefly for its cloudy allegorical suggestiveness; they delighted to read it as an edifying puzzle, a Christmas pie full of moral sugarplums. It was, as E. P. Whipple said, "a labyrinth of guesses," in which biased interpreters followed such different clues that the were led to discoveries of meaning sometimes flatly contradictory to each other. Thus, Father A. F. Hewitt, writing in the Catholic World in 1885, found in the romance a record of Hawthorne's being "brought face to face with Catholicism, having his mind freed to a considerable extent from Protestant prejudices"; whereas Jessie K. Curtis, writing in the Andover Review a few years later, asserted that the book represents "Protestantism facing Popery." (These apparently conflicting views are perhaps not irreconcilable, as we shall see, although such opinions are so explicit that they express merely part-truths about the romance.)