Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy (review)

Abstract

If, as the familiar saying goes, all roads lead to Rome, then it appears that the roads taken by nineteenth-century American writers and artists often led them through Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. At least, such is the initial impression one gets upon looking into this illuminating critical collection. Fully seven of the twelve essays in Roman Holidays concern themselves directly with the production and/or reception of Hawthorne's 1860 romance, while four of the remaining five also cite the novel at least once (the lone exception is Robert Milder's examination of Herman Melville's 1856-1857 visit to the Mediterranean region, which mentions Hawthorne only as a fellow traveler in Italy). Taking their cue from a comment Henry James makes in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, Robert Martin and Leland Person observe in their introduction that Hawthorne's last completed work of fiction "served as a guidebook for travelers [to Rome], who went to see the sites of the novel, and illustrated editions provided reproductions of paintings and sculptures" that were to be described and adapted yet again in subsequent works of art (2). However, this initial identification of The Marble Faun as the "pretextual presence" (3) of many post-1860 works by Americans in and about Italy quickly leads to a much broader analysis of the reception, appropriation, and representation of a specific place in the history of American literature and art. Roman Holidays amply demonstrates that Americans' "cultural interpretation or reading" (3) of Italy in the nineteenth century repeatedly came back not only to the history of aesthetics and form but, more pointedly, to questions of nationality, race, and gender. [End Page 193]