War and Union in Little America: The Space of Hawthorne's Rome

Abstract

[I brave] the imputation of making a mere Rome of words, talking of a Rome of my own which was no Rome of reality. That comes up as exactly the point-that no Rome of reality was concerned in our experience, that the whole thing was a rare state of the imagination [....] Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends I Home to one of the United States' earliest expatriate communities and an important overseas center for artistic creation, nineteenth-century Rome was simultaneously a physical locus for the production of American arts and letters, an iconic symbol of America's Republican heritage, and a setting onto which Americans projected their hopes and fears for the contemporary United States. Rome was, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "the capital of the ancient & of the modern world" (372), and for Nathaniel Hawthorne, no less than for sculptors like Thomas Crawford and William Story, it was a space in which to fashion American symbols. The Marble Faun (1860) offered descriptions of exotic foreign landscapes to an American readership eager for firsthand views of both contemporary and historic Europe, and for cues as to their own developing national identity. This article suggests how Hawthorne's descriptions of (or as James might have said, imaginations of) Rome tell a story of national identity and national schisms during a period of civil turmoil, unification and territorial expansion on both sides of the Atlantic. As Emerson noted, "Every traveler must describe not what is, but what he sees," for "the best things we learn" from travel in Italy are "confirmation in unexpected quarters of our simplest sentiments at home." "[N]ames and places" being "of small importance," he supposed, a "well regulated mind will attain to the same thoughts and feelings in Sicily, in Rome, in New England" (Lectures 90). Much as Michel de Certeau imagined that "we travel abroad to discover in distant lands something whose presence at home has become unrecognizable" (50), Henry James wrote in 1867 that Americans in Europe were able to "pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically &c) claim our property wherever we find it" (A Life in Letters 17). This "aesthetic claiming" of cultural markers in a landscape already rich with its own systems of meaning is an act de Certeau dubbed a tactic, a technique many critics have noted in American writings of the period set in Rome. Paola Gemme, for example, has outlined Risorgimento-era comparisons of Italians with American slaves, and of Austrian rulers with American slaveholders, a paradigm used to support arguments both for and against U.S. slavery. Dennis Berthold, meanwhile, has suggested that connections between foreign politics and American domestic issues influenced the writings of Herman Melville, whose fictional characters may have been inspired by contemporary Risorgimento leaders (122) and who drew parallels between Italy's unification and the North's struggle to end slavery while maintaining the union. Such transatlantic transferences may also map geographic metaphors found in Italy back onto the United States. Annamaria Formichella Elsden notes how critics have identified passages from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Agnes of Sorrento (1861), contrasting "southern" Italy with "northern" Europe, "as evidence of a neat north/south parallelism that can be imported back to U.S. soil" (67). Elsden cites Nathalia Wright's reference to "an echo of the nineteenth-century American sectional conflict over slavery in the contrast established between the voluptuous south of Italy and the north, with its reforming impulse" (Wright 93), and Jenny Franchot's suggestion that Agnes of Sorrento "offers an expatriate justification for American northern assertions of superiority over the American South ... and its enslaved population of African Americans" (Franchot 247). This geographic binarism of South and North in the antebellum United States was also being "exported" in the other direction and projected onto Rome by American writers. …