Killing the Angel in the House: The Marble Faun and the Imagination of Violence

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article offers a specific investigation of female violence as both an explicit and a covert theme of The Marble Faun. Woman’s capacity to inflict harm is not just adumbrated in Miriam’s instigation to murder, but keeps resurfacing in multiple images, fragments, and allusions that mobilize a vast cultural archive. Unlike most readings of Hawthorne’s last completed novel, this article argues that the paradigm of active violence fails to successfully separate the sinfulness of the “dark lady” Miriam from the purity of the “fair maiden” Hilda. Rather, the specter of disruptive agency haunts both characters and appears to be inextricably associated with their identity as self-dependent artists living abroad, inhabiting studios that subvert the nineteenth-century definition of women as private domestic subjects. The symbolic association between female artists, violence, and the erosion of the domestic ideal is further explored through Hawthorne’s subtly unsettling encounters with actual women (Harriet Hosmer, Anna Jameson, Fredrika Bremer) living in Rome, as reported in his journal.