‘Of marble men and maidens’: Sin, Sculpture and Perversion in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble...

'Of marble men and maidens': Sin, Sculpture, and Perversion in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "TheMarble Faun"Author(s): PATRICIA PULHAMSource: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1/2, THE ARTS IN VICTORIANLITERATURE (2010), pp. 83-102Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41059782 .

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'Of marble men and maidens': Sin, Sculpture, and Perversion in Nathaniel Hawthorne's

The Marble Faun PATRICIA PULHAM

University of Portsmouth

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! John Keats)1

In 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1819) John Keats draws attention to the tension between life and death: his 'marble men and maidens' are in a state of suspen- sion between movement and stasis and, along with the urn itself, their sculpted bodies function as sites of meditation, spaces on which troubling existential thoughts may be projected. These figures, while having poignant significance in the context of Keats's brief life, also point to a wider concern with the archaeo- logical artefact and, more specifically, with the sculptural body, which had acquired progressive aesthetic importance since the private and public acquisi- tion of classical statuary in England and France, and the publication in the late eighteenth century of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's influential treatises on the history of the art of antiquity.2 The statue also began to figure significantly in English and European literature of the early nineteenth century and appears in different forms in works by William Hazlitt, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Heine, and Prosper Mérimée.3 However, in American fiction it is not until the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (i860) that one finds a concerted engagement with the antique sculptural body. The reason for this may be that, owing to distance, the classical tourism encouraged by the European Grand Tour had no real counterpart in American culture until the 1830s, when Europe, and particularly Italy, became a prime destination for American tourists.

'John Keats, 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. by Duncan Wu, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 1060-61 (p. 1061). 2 In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, the Grand Tour, undertaken by young men from the European upper classes, resulted in the transportation of classical artefacts from Greece and Italy to their homes and national museums. In particular, the arrival of the Venus de Milo in Paris in 1820 inspired considerable public interest. Winckelmann's influential texts include Thoughts on the Imitation of the Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture (1755) and History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). 6 William Hazlitt, Liber Amoris, Or The New Pygmalion (1823), E- T- A Hoifmann, 'The Sandman' (1816), Heinrich Heine, Florentine flights (1837), and Prosper Mérimée, 'La Venus d'llle' (1837).



84 Sin, Sculpture, and Perversion in The Marble Faun

Italy has often featured significantly in the nineteenth-century American imagination. The list of American authors who have written about Italy, in journals or in literary works, is long enough to merit a comprehensive website, and the critic Nathalia Wright has argued that 'no other foreign country has figured so provocatively in American fiction'.4 For the nineteenth-century American tourist Italy held a special fascination, and Rome's architectural layers and plethora of antiquities in particular offered the travellers a close encounter with the European cultural heritage which had nourished their ancestors and which their own country could not match. The number of American visits to Rome rose considerably in the nineteenth century, increasing from approxi- mately two hundred in 1835, and a thousand in 1840, to thirty thousand by 1900.5 For one of these tourists, Henry Leland, Rome is the 'antithesis' of America: it is 'all of the past' and 'full of lessons'.6 For others, the historical weight of Rome challenged both notions of identity and sexuality, undermining American ideas of civilization and morality.7

Nathaniel Hawthorne, staying in Italy in 1858-59 as part of his own touristic sojourn, moved in Roman circles of expatriate artists that included the American sculptors Paul Akers, William Wetmore Story, Randolph Rogers, and Harriet Hosmer.8 The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni, to give its full title, features romanticized versions of such artists and unwittingly contributed to American tourism, providing an unofficial guide to Rome.9 However, its subtitle suggests the influence of English Gothic fiction, and indeed the novel has a semi-Gothic plot that centres on four protagonists: Miriam, an artist with a secret past that torments her; Hilda, a copyist; Kenyon, a sculptor who is in love with Hilda; and Donatello, their Italian friend who is in love with Miriam.10 The novel plays with the multilayered history of Rome. Its pagan, medieval, and Renaissance pasts infiltrate the present in unexpected ways: the friends note that Donatello is the double of Praxiteles' marble faun displayed in the Capitoline Museum;11 Hilda becomes increasingly identified with the Virgin Mary; and

4 See <eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/ Accounts_of_American_Travelers_to_Italy> (accessed 8 December 2009); and Nathalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), p. 29. 5 Richard H. Brodhead, Introduction to Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni,

ed. by Brodhead (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. ix-xxix (pp. xii, xiii). D Henry P. Leland, Americans in Rome (New York: Uñarles 1. Iwans, 1003), p. 3. 1 Robert K. Martin and Leland a. Person, Introduction, in Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in

Mneteenth-Centwy Italy, ed. by Martin and Person (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2002), pp. 1-2. 0 (Benjamin) Paul Akers (1825-61) was a sculptor who worked in Rome from 1855 till his death. William

Wetmore Story (1819-95), sculptor, writer, and art critic, lived in Rome briefly in 1848 and again from 1850. Randolph Rogers (1825-92) was a sculptor who owned a studio in Rome from 1854 till his death. Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) studied in Rome under the English sculptor John Gibson from 1853 to i860. 9 Brodhead, Introduction, p. xii. luThe subtitle is reminiscent of Ann Radcline s novels A Sicilian Romance (1790) and I he Romance of the borest

(1791), while its Italian setting also resonates with that featured in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797)- 1 1 The Satyr, or Faun of Praxiteles, dates from the second century bge.



PATRICIA PULHAM 85

Miriam and Hilda are implicitly associated with the Renaissance parricide, Beatrice Cenci.12 As the novel progresses, the foursome's friendships are

seriously tested. Miriam is pursued through the streets of Rome by a man they name 'The Model', a sinister figure from her past; and Donatello, wishing to free her from his power, murders him and loses his faun-like innocence in the

process. While bringing Miriam and Donatello closer together, this act alienates Hilda from both of them, but in particular from Miriam, with whom she has had a close friendship. Kenyon, ignorant of the crime, cannot understand the change in Donatello, nor Hilda's change of heart with regard to Miriam. Donatello and Miriam, now criminal and accomplice, sully their friends' purity, but this 'purity' is already questionable and the foursome's relationships complicate any simple notion of heterosexual coupling or desire.

I suggest that the sculptural body of Hawthorne's faun, a symbol of pagan licence and sexual ambiguity, channels the erotic instability of the friends' desires and calls our attention to other statues in the text that have significant implications for this reading of the novel. Prior to the publication of the American edition of The Marble Faun in March i860, Hawthorne's final novel had appeared in Britain in February of the same year under the title Transfor- mation: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni, a title, it seems, that he subsequently 'resisted using'.13 This resistance posits a tension between the two titles: 'Trans- formation' suggests slippage, change, and ambiguity, while the 'marble' body of the faun focuses the mind on stasis, ossification, and fossilization. In this essay I argue that this movement from animation to stasis is also charted through the explicit and implicit erotic relationships of the novel's main characters -

Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello - a movement that is played out via the sculptural bodies that appear in the text.

The novel opens with a chapter dedicated to the four protagonists in which they visit a sculpture gallery at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. Here they encounter the eponymous 'marble faun', the Faun of Praxiteles, which they identify as Donatello's double. However, before the faun appears, we are greeted by other statues that are of equal if unacknowledged importance. Hawthorne writes: Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery, in the Capitol, at Rome. It was in that room [. . .] in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator [see Figure 1] , just sinking into his death-swoon. Around

12 The notorious Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci (1577-99) was tried and executed for the murder of her father, Francesco Cenci, who had abused her. li Carol Hanbury MacKay, Hawthorne, Sophia, and Hilda as Copyists: Duplication and Transformation in

The Marble Faun' Browning Institute Studies: An Annual of Victorian Literary and Cultural History, 12 (1984), 93-120 (p. 102).




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PATRICIA PULHAM 87

the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon [see Figure 2], the Lycian Apollo, the Juno, all famous productions of antique sculpture.14 The sculptural figures depicted here point to significant events and themes in Hawthorne's novel. At the heart of the story lies a sin, ostensibly a murder: Donatello kills 'The Model'. This act is prompted by Miriam's gaze, which Donatello interprets as a look of assent. It is a deed that proceeds to bind them 'closer than a marriage-bond' (p. 174). 'The Dying Gladiator' (see Figure 1) is mentioned briefly prior to the incident. As the group take a moonlit walk, they stop at the Colosseum. There, we are told, a black cross 'marks one of the especial blood-spots of the earth, where, thousands of times over, the Dying Gladiator fell, and more human agony has been endured, for the mere pastime of the multitude, than on the breadth of many battle-fields'. However, the 'crime and the suffering' symbolized by the black cross, also prefigure the crime and suffering consequent on the murder of The Model (p. 154). Moreover, the Capi- toline Antinous and the Lycian Apollo have their own interesting connotations. The Antinous, representing the emperor Hadrian's lover, suggests a homoerotic subtext in Hawthorne's novel, as indeed does the Lycian Apollo. The Apollo represents a god who, in Greek myth, loves the beautiful boy Hyacinthus, a name that becomes a 'homosexual pseudonym'.15 Sharing the faun's ephebic masculinity, the Antinous and Apollo, by implication, draw attention to Donatello 's sexual ambiguity, and the Apollo, arguably, also stands for Kenyon, who, as sculptor, indulges in what has been defined as an Apollonian art.16 Similarly, the Amazon and the Juno have their counterparts in Hilda and Miriam. Hilda's asexuality mirrors the Amazon's sexual ambiguity, and her name, meaning 'battle-maiden', recalls the Amazon's military prowess. The Juno, whose name can mean 'vital force', captures Miriam's sexual energy, and the association of the Roman goddess with maternal worship hints at Miriam's implicit role as the object of Hilda's homoerotic desire.17

These preliminary sculptural doubles point to other aesthetic doublings that occur in the text. As Jonathan Auerbach observes:

14 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, p. 5. All references are to the Brodhead edition and will mostly be given in the text. 'The Dying Gladiator' is now more commonly known as 'The Dying Gaul' (c. 220 bce), a Roman marble copy after a bronze original from Pereramon, Turkey. 15 For a discussion of 'Hyacinthus' as a homosexual pseudonym see Patricia Pulham, 'Tinted and Tainted Love: The Sculptural Body in Olive Custance's Poetry', Yearbook of English Studies, Ti Í2007), 162-76 (d. m). lbThe term 'ephebic masculinity' is used to describe the ambiguity of the adolescent male body; see Abigail

Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 202. The Capitoline Antinous is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Greek statue of Hermes dating from c. fourth century bce. For Apollonian art see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. by Michael Tanner, trans, by Shaun Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 14. 17 Nina Baym, 'The Marble Faun: Hawthorne's Elegy for Art', Mew England Quarterly, 44 (197 1), 355-76 (pp. 359, 371). Baym notes that Hilda is 'separated from her sexuality'. The etymology of 'Juno' is disputed: its Latin root comes from iuvenis, meaning 'young man', while its Indo-European root suggests yeu-, meaning 'vital force; see American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edn (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).




Figure 2 The Wounded Amazon (marble sculpture, 5th century bce), Roman copy of a Greek original by Phidias. © Capitoline Museums, Rome.



PATRICIA PULHAM 89

Throughout The Marble Faun 'the Actual' and 'the Imaginary,' are constantly shifting places: people gain identity through works of art, and works of art are transformed into human beings [...]. Miriam and Donatello [. . .] are 'living models' who repeatedly are defined in terms of art objects. Kenyon calls the Faun of Praxiteles Donatello's 'identity', while the narrator portrays Miriam's face solely by describing her self-portrait, in an attempt to 'bring it more forcibly before the reader'.18

Similarly, Kenyon's Cleopatra, based on William Wetmore Story's statue of the same name and figured in a repose 'held between two pulse-throbs', functions as a sculptural double of Miriam, who, in the statue's repressed passion and desolation, recognizes her own emotional state.19 As Miriam views the sculpture in Kenyon's studio, the narrator tells us that she felt that Cleopatra had sunk down out of the fever and turmoil of her life and, for one instant [. . .] had relinquished all activity, and was resting throughout every vein and muscle. It was the repose of despair [...]. But still there was a great, smouldering furnace, deep down in the woman's heart. The repose, no doubt, was as complete as if she were never to stir hand or foot again; and yet, such was the creature's latent energy and fierceness, she might spring up on you like a tigress, and stop the very breath that you were now drawing, midway in your throat, (p. 126)

Prompted by what she perceives to be Kenyon's understanding of such a woman, Miriam considers revealing her secret past to him, but, sensing his reluctance to know, exclaims, '"You can do nothing for me, unless you petrify me into a marble companion for your Cleopatra there"' (p. 129).20

This combination of dangerous energy and 'repose' recurs in the image of Beatrice Cenci, in which both Miriam and Hilda are twinned.21 Spencer Hall argues that the painting functions as 'a kind of nexus' between the two women, a '"symbolic mirror" in which each recognizes both self and other, thus reflect- ing the inexorable bond of common humanity' that links them together.22 Hall points to two key moments in the text when this 'mirroring' occurs: the first takes place in chapter 7, 'Beatrice', and the second in chapter 23, 'Miriam and Hilda'.23 He notes that in these chapters the women's images appear at times to merge in interesting ways. These moments of identification are worth exploring more closely. In chapter 7, looking at her copy of the painting, Hilda declares Beatrice 'a fallen angel, and yet sinless', a phrase that foreshadows both women's negotiations of guilt and innocence following their witnessing of Donatello's

18 Jonathan Auerbach, 'Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture, and Romance-Writing in Hawthorne's The Marble Faurì, ELH, 47 (1080), 103-20 (p. 104). 19 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, p. 126. In his preface to The Marble Faun (pp. 1-4), Hawthorne confesses to having 'stolen' 'a magnificent statue of Cleopatra, the production of Mr. William W. Story' for his novel (p. 4). 20 Miriam's secret is never revealed. 21 Originally attributed to Guido Reni, the portrait of Beatrice Cenci is now thought to have been painted

by a woman artist of his circle, Elisabetta Sirani. 11 Spencer Hall, 'Beatrice Cenci: Symbol and Vision in The Marble Faun', Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1970), 85-95 (p. 86). a Hall, pp. 86-87.



go Sin, Sculpture, and Perversion in The Marble Faun

crime (p. 66). Later, in chapter 23, after the murder, Miriam visits Hilda, and the painting once again takes centre stage: The chair, in which Hilda sat, was near the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, which had not yet been taken from the easel. It is a peculiarity of this picture, that its profoundest expression eludes a straightforward glance, and can only be caught by side glimpses [...]. Now, opposite the easel, hung a looking-glass, in which Beatrice's face and Hilda's were both reflected. In one of her weary, nerveless changes of position, Hilda happened to throw her eyes on the glass, and took in both these images at one unpremeditated glance. She fancied - nor was it without horrour [sic] - that Beatrice's expression, seen aside and vanishing in a moment, had been depicted in her own face, likewise, and flitted from it timorously, (p. 205) The play of reflections depicted in this passage merges Beatrice, Miriam, and Hilda. Yet it is worth noting that the doubled expression of innocent fallenness between Beatrice and Hilda is predicated on a doubling between Miriam and Beatrice's father. Of Beatrice's expression the narrator states, Tt was the consciousness of her father's sin that threw its shadow over her', and that, similarly, Tt was the knowledge of Miriam's guilt that lent the same expression to Hilda's face' (p. 205). Hall's argument that these moments underscore the women's 'sisterhood',24 is complicated and eroticized by the fact that Miriam is posited as Francesco Cenci's double, a man accused of incest by his daughter. Furthermore, the centrality of Guido Reni's painting in a book primarily concerned with sculpture hints at displacement and points us towards another image of Beatrice Cenci: Harriet Hosmer's 1856 sculptural representation of the same figure.

In an essay that considers the impact of Hawthorne's work on that of Henry James, John Carlos Rowe observes that 'Hawthorne's frequent references to Beatrice Cenci, albeit made primarily to Guido Reni's portrait, also include Hosmer's sculpture', and he notes that James referred to Hosmer and her fellow female artists working in Rome in the mid-nineteenth century as a 'strange sisterhood of American "lady sculptors'".25 This 'strange sisterhood' also suggests the idea of the 'Romantic friendship' or 'Boston marriage', which, according to Lilian Faderman, had existed in recognizable forms for centuries. In her respected discussion of same-sex love Faderman writes that her research uncovered numerous examples in fact and fiction of passionate commitment between women. She found that in the nineteenth century 'there were common terms to describe love relationships between women, such as "the love of kindred spirits," "Boston marriage," and "sentimental friends'", and adds that, although she had at first assumed that this kind of romantic attachment was a Victorian

24 Hall, p. 88. 25 John Carlos Rowe, 'Hawthorne's Ghost in James's Italy: Sculptural Form, Romantic Narrative, and the Function of Sexuality in The Marble Faun, 'Adina' and William Wetmore Story and his Friends', in Roman Holidays, ed. by Martin and Person, pp. 73-106 (p. 76).



PATRICIA PULHAM gì

phenomenon, she soon found such friendships not only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also in the Renaissance.26 Among the relationships Faderman identifies are those between members of 'the Roman colony of artists who gathered around the sculptor Harriet Hosmer', and she notes that 'Hosmer's letters as well as biographies of friends' suggest that she probably had romantic friendships with a number of women, including the writer Matilda Hays and possibly the American actress Charlotte Cushman.27 Interestingly, in her analysis of Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci, Vivien Green Fryd, using Terry Castle's model of the apparitional lesbian, argues that, via the incest taboo, Hosmer's statue 'ghosts' her own complex homoerotic desires.28 In The Marble Faun, in which Hosmer's statue 'ghosts' the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, a sculpture is similarly suggestive of homoerotic desire between Miriam and Hilda, a matter to which I shall return later in this essay.

Interestingly, in critical terms the erotic charge underlying the relationship between the two women has been overlooked, and it is the homoerotic relationship between the men in the novel that has received greater attention. Quoting from Hawthorne's notebooks,29 Robert Martin demonstrates how Hawthorne's fascination with Praxiteles' Faun is expressed in language resonant of homoerotic desire; he notes that Hawthorne lovingly records how the faun's front is exposed, '"displaying a very beautiful form'" and argues that, in the figure of the faun, he appears to celebrate the male body and, in particular, the faun's '"voluptuous mouth" and "sensual nature'".30 The narrator's own description of the faun in Hawthorne's novel draws on this impression, but the language oscillates between images of innocent playfulness and eroticism: The Faun is the marble image of a young man [see Figure 3] , leaning his right arm on the trunk or stump of a tree [...]. His only garment - a lion's skin, with the claw upon his shoulder - falls half-way down his back, leaving the limbs and entire front of the figure nude. The form, thus displayed, is marvellously graceful, but has a fuller and more rounded outline, more flesh, and less of heroic muscle, than the old sculptors were wont to assign to their types of masculine beauty. The character of the face corresponds with the figure; it is most agreeable in outline and feature, but rounded, and somewhat voluptuously developed [...]. The mouth, with its full, yet delicate lips, seems so nearly

26 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Junction, 198 1), p. 16. 27 Faderman, pp. 219, 449 n. 43. Matilda Hays (1820-97) was a writer and editor, and translator of Georges Sand; Charlotte Cushman (1816-76) was one of the well-known American actresses of the mid-nineteenth century. Both were involved for a time, before Hays left Cushman for Hosmer in 18^4. 28 Vivien Green Fryd, 'The "Ghosting" of Incest and Female Relations in Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci", Art Bulletin, 88 (2006), 292-309. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Castle identifies 'speciality' as a trope for cultural representa- tions of lesbianism in literature and film. 29 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks, ed. by Thomas Woodson, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 14 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980). M Robert K. Martin, An Awful Freedom : Hawthorne and the Anxieties of the Carnival', in Roman Holidays, ed. by Martin and Person, pp. 28-40 (p. 34).




Figure 3 The Faun of Praxiteles (Greek marble sculpture, 4th century bge). © Capitoline Museums, Rome.



PATRICIA PULHAM 93

to smile outright, that it calls forth a responsive smile. The whole statue - unlike anything else that ever was wrought in that severe material of marble - conveys the idea of an amiable and sensual creature, easy, mirthful, apt for jollity, yet not incapable of being touched by pathos. It is impossible to gaze long at this stone image without conceiving a kindly sentiment towards it, as if its substance were warm to the touch, and imbued with actual life. It comes very close to some of our pleasantest sympathies, (p. 9)

The faun's voluptuousness and its sensuality are still depicted, but the eroticism of its 'delicate lips' is undermined by a smile, which, according to Hawthorne's narrator, expresses amiability, mirthfulness and 'jollity' (p. 9). Desire is still present in the temptation to 'touch' and in the fantasy of animation, yet it is prompted not by an erotic engagement with the statue, but by a 'kindly sentiment' such as one might feel towards a charming, pleasant child with whom one is not closely acquainted. The passage anticipates Walter Pater's discussion of Greek sculpture in his essay on Winckelmann, in The Renaissance (1873), where we are told that '[t]he beauty of the Greek statues was a sexless beauty'.31 Like Pater's Winckelmann, Hawthorne 'fingers those pagan marbles with unsinged hands',32 but, as Leland Person acknowledges, the subtlety of Pater's description 'highlights the nuanced language' that Hawthorne lacks.33 In both cases, however, the androgynous sculptural body encodes male homoeroticism. In The Marble Faun, this is transposed on to the living body of Donatello, which, in a moment of narrative fantasy, imbues the statues and bas-reliefs in the Capitoline gallery with life: The realization of the antique Faun, in the person of Donatello, gave a more vivid character to all these marble ghosts. Why should not each statue grow warm with life! Antinous might lift his brow, and tell us why he is forever sad. The Lycian Apollo might strike his lyre; and, at the first vibration, that other Faun in red marble [. . .] should frisk gaily forth, leading yonder Satyrs [. . .] to clatter their little hoofs upon the floor, and all join hands with Donatello! Bacchus, too, a rosy flush diffusing itself over his time- stained surface, would come down from his pedestal, and offer a cluster of purple grapes to Donatello 's lips, because the god recognizes him as the woodland elf who so often shared his revels! And here, on this sarcophagus, the exquisitely carved figures might assume life, and chase one another round its verge with that wild merriment which is so strangely represented on those old burial coffers, though still with some subtle allusion to Death, carefully veiled, but forever peeping forth amid emblems of mirth and riot. (p. 18) The 'sarcophagus' here mentioned signals what Sheldon Liebman has identified as a recurring motif in The Marble Faun, which I shall explore in the conclusion to this essay, but for the moment I want to consider the earlier part of this passage, which specifically focuses on fauns and satyrs, Antinous, Apollo, and

31 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. by Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 176. 51 Pater, p. 177. 66 Leland S. Person, Falling into Heterosexuality: Sculpting Male Bodies in The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson', in Roman Holidays, ed. by Martin and Person, pp. 107-39 (P- HO)-




Bacchus, making no mention of the female statues of the Amazon and Juno, and thus suggesting a delight in the youthful male body of antique Greek sculpture.34 The inclusion of Bacchus and the faun's affinity with the god imply an acknowledgement of Dionysian licence and sexual ambiguity which figure together in the carnivalesque scenes that litter Hawthorne's novel and which play a part in the restoration of order. However, it is primarily the slippage between Donatello and the figure of the faun that highlights the presence of homoerotic attraction, albeit negotiated via the heterosexual couplings of Miriam and Donatello, Kenyon and Hilda. Moreover, this homoerotic desire manifests itself through three key triangular relationships: Miriam, Donatello, and Kenyon; Kenyon, Miriam, and Hilda; Hilda, Miriam, and Donatello.

While acknowledging the problematic nature of René Girard's theory of mimetic desire, which is predicated, as Robert Casillo points out, on the primacy of 'normative heterosexuality', I suggest that the triangular models of desire posited in The Marble Faun have interesting implications.35 In the penultimate chapter of Hawthorne's novel, which sets Miriam, Donatello, and Kenyon in the Roman carnival, the protagonists hold hands and are referred to by the narrator as 'a linked circle of three' (p. 448). The word 'circle' points to the implicit 'circulation' of desire that characterizes their relationship within the story. For Girard, 'mimetic desire' is opposed to 'desire selon soi, desire that is a spontaneous and autonomous manifestation of an individual's inherent wants or preferences'.36 As Paisley Livingston explains: Instead of having an 'immediate' relation to his or her objects of desire, the person who desires mimetically has a 'mediated' relation to them, one that takes a detour through a model. Desire, then, is said to be 'triangular,' for its most basic structure involves at least three terms: the agent who desires, the object of this agent's desire, and the agent who serves as the 'model' or 'mediator' of the desire.37

Although, ostensibly, Hilda is the object of Kenyon's desire, the doubling of Hilda and Miriam through the figure of Beatrice Cenci complicates the simplic- ity of that coupling. Moreover, his statue of Cleopatra, bearing Miriam's sexual and spiritual energy, in its 'hot life' is inspired in a moment of creative passion. When Miriam tells the sculptor, '"My dear friend, it is a great work!'" and asks '"How have you learned to do it?'", Kenyon replies: '"It is the concretion of a good deal of thought, emotion, and toil of brain and hand [...]. I kindled a great fire within my mind, and threw in the material [. . .] and, in the midmost heat, up rose Cleopatra, as you see her'" (p. 127). Miriam continues: '"What I

34 Sheldon W. Liebman, 'The Design of The Marble Faun', New England Quarterly, 40 (1967), 61-78 (p. 74). 35 Robert Casillo, 'Twilight of the Sacred: René Girard Reappraised', Annals of Scholarship: An International Quarterly in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 11 (1997), 405-31 (p. 409). ib See Paisley Livingston, Models of Destre: René Girard and the Psychology oj Mimesis (Baltimore, MU: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1QQ2), p. 1. 37 Livingston, p. 1.



PATRICIA PULHAM 95

most marvel at [. . .] is the womanhood that you have so thoroughly mixed up with all those seemingly discordant elements. Where did you get that secret: You never found it in your gentle Hilda. Yet I recognize its truth'" (p. 127). In compar- ison to the magnificent Cleopatra, clearly modelled on Miriam, Hilda inspires only a fetishistic hand 'delicately sculptured in marble' (p. 120).

The contrast between these two works of art suggests a passion for Miriam that is channelled into sculpture. Yet Kenyon also attempts to sculpt a bust of Donatello, an act that consolidates him as the object of Kenyon's homoerotic gaze. Miriam's consciousness of Kenyon's unexpressed desire surfaces in the discussion that takes place in the marble saloon of Donatello 's Tuscan home. Told that Kenyon plans to ramble among the hills and valleys of the region with Donatello in order to lift his spirits, Miriam, 'not without jealousy', comments, '"You are taking him from me, and putting yourself, and all manner of living interests into the place which I ought to fill'" (p. 285). In reply, Kenyon states: 'I do not pretend to be the guide or counsellor whom Donatello needs; for, to mention no other obstacle, I am a man, and, between man and man, there is always an insuper- able gulf. They can never quite grasp each other's hands; and therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart-substance, from his brother man, but from woman - his mother, his sister, or his wife', (p. 285) Miriam's 'jealousy', or consciousness of Kenyon's latent desire, resurfaces towards the end of the novel. '[WJatching the sculptor's eye as it dwelt admiringly on Donatello', Miriam asks '"Is he not beautiful?'" (p. 434). The first exchange suggests Kenyon's disavowal of desire for Donatello even as it reinforces it. In recognizing that what Donatello needs is a 'mother', a 'sister', or a 'wife', he simultaneously acknowledges that he is playing at least one or more of these parts. In addition, by referring to the emotional and physical gulf between men, he also implicitly suggests his desire to overcome that chasm: to grasp Donatello 's hand and to offer that 'intimate help' and 'heart-substance' that it is woman's prerogative to provide. As John Carlos Rowe notes, such instances represent 'a threatening homoeroticism that conventional modes of homosociality cannot control'. He argues that the 'incomplete friendship' between Kenyon and Donatello, 'qualified as it is by their sometimes conflicting sexual desires for Miriam and even at times for each other', is a good example of Hawthorne's homoerotic anxieties.38 In Girard's terms, Kenyon's mimetic desire for Miriam (the object of Donatello's desire) is displaced and becomes a homoerotically charged love for Donatello.

This slippage between homoerotic and heterosexual desire is represented in sculptural terms in the modelling of Donatello's bust. Requesting to sculpt him, Kenyon says to Donatello, '"Your head in marble would be a treasure to me.

38 Rowe, 'Hawthorne's Ghost in James's Italy', p. 86.




Shall I have it?'" (p. 228). Donatelle* expresses his reluctance, finding it troubling to 'be looked at steadfastly' (p. 228). In response, Kenyon states that this will be no hindrance and that he will 'catch the likeness and expression by side-glimpses' recalling those 'side-glimpses' required to obtain a true view of Reni's image of Beatrice Cenci, thus linking Donatello to the doubled images of Miriam and Hilda. However, the process presents Kenyon with unexpected difficulties. We learn that: He had never undertaken a portrait-bust which gave him so much trouble as Donatello 's; not that there was any special difficulty in hitting the likeness [...]. But he was chiefly perplexed how to make this genial and kindly type of countenance the index of the mind within. [. . .] Wielding that wonderful power which sculptors possess over moist clay, [. . .] he compressed, elongated, widened, and otherwise altered the features of the bust, in mere recklessness, and, at every change, inquired of the Count whether the expression became anywise more satisfactory.

'Stop!' cried Donatello, at last, catching the sculptor's hand. 'Let it remain so!' By some accidental handling of the clay, entirely independent of his own will,

Kenyon had given the countenance a distorted and violent look [...]. Had Hilda, or had Miriam, seen the bust, with the expression it had now assumed, they might have recognized Donatello's face as they beheld it at that terrible moment, when he held his victim over the edge of the precipice. [. . .] [WJithout [. . .] heeding Donatello's remon- strances, the sculptor again applied his artful fingers to the clay, and compelled the bust to dismiss the expression that had so startled them both. (pp. 270-73)

Leland Person claims that this incident and its dramatic climax have significant implications. For Person, 'Donatello's bust operates like a prosthesis, a second, replicated head', and he reads Donatello's staying of Kenyon's hand as a 'homo- aesthetic orgasm', a 'laying on of hands in a play of passion that massages another man's body until he cries out in pleasure and self-recognition'.39 However, he acknowledges that here the process is given 'a perverse twist' and argues that '[w]hat Kenyon brings forth [. . .] is an erotically charged Donatello, but constructed heterosexually through Miriam's desiring gaze into a homo- social and jealous lover',40 one whose deed binds them 'closer than a marriage- bond' (p. 174). Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Kenyon ignores Donatello's desire to still the bust's expression, and proceeds to remodel the head.

Intriguingly, Miriam also shares a 'marriage-bond' with Hilda. This suggests a triangular Girardian relationship between Kenyon, Hilda, and Miriam in which Hilda's heterosexual coupling with Kenyon displaces her homoerotic desire for Miriam. This is implied in the text by the language used to describe the women's relationship. Considering the nature of Miriam's sin and her own rejection of her former friend, Hilda asks herself 'whether there were not other questions to be considered, aside from the single one of Miriam's guilt or

39 Person, Tailing into Heterosexuality', pp. 121-22. w Person, p. 122.



PATRICIA PULHAM 97

innocence; as, for example, whether a close bond of friendship [. . .] ought to be severed on account of any unworthiness' that is subsequently detected in one's friend (p. 385). Tor in these unions of hearts,' Hilda considers, '(call them marriage, or whatever else) we take each other for better, for worse' (p. 385). Earlier in the novel, when Miriam visits Hilda following the murder of The Model, she tells her, '"I loved you dearly! I love you still! You were to me as a younger sister; yes, dearer than sisters of the same blood'" (p. 207). The relationship between Miriam and Hilda is posited as a form of romantic friendship that recalls those of their real-life sisters, James's 'strange sisterhood' of American artists,41 and hints at homoerotic desire between the two women.

Moreover, it seems significant that Hilda's 'marriage-bond' with Miriam mimics Donatello's own, a bond that is forged at the moment The Model is murdered. Interestingly, this moment also has important repercussions for Hilda's sense of self. According to Person, the crime marks Donatello's fall 'into heterosexuality', transforming him into 'a man who instantaneously enjoys a "union" born in passion, [which is] "cemented with blood'".42 Crucially, Hilda witnesses this crime and feels herself 'stained with guilt' and 'spotted' with sin, resulting in her confession to a Catholic priest (pp. 205, 329). In her essay on Harriet Hosmer's implicit presence in The Marble Faun, Nancy Proctor argues that Donatello's crime hides another crime that is also 'a crime of passion, a crime of desire'.43 This crime centres on Hosmer, the absent woman sculptor who, in Hawthorne's novel is, like Edgar Allan Poe's 'purloined letter', hidden in full view.44 But equally, Donatello's crime hides a sin, a sin that, like the crime, is founded on desire, and again, like Poe's purloined letter, is there for us to find if we would only look in the right place or ask the right questions. One might ask, for example, what is the sin by which Hilda feels stained? Is it truly her ambiguous position as bystander at the time of the murder, or is it something else? Does the murder, while triggering an eroticized moment of heterosexual desire between Miriam and Donatello, also provoke Hilda's tacit recognition of her own love for Miriam? Her actions, following the murder, could certainly be construed as those of a spurned lover. Hilda interprets Miriam's role in the murder as an act of 'faithlessness', and she resolves that they must thenceforth 'be forever strangers' (p. 206).

The imagery used to describe Hilda following the murder of The Model, her obsession with the Virgin Mary despite being a 'daughter of the Puritans' (p. 362), and the doubling between Miriam and herself, all point towards a

41 Rowe, 'Hawthorne's Ghost in James's Italy', p. 76. 42 Person, 'Falling into Heterosexuality', p. 121. 40 Nancy Proctor, 'The Purloined Studio: The Woman Sculptor as Phallic Ghost in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun' in Roman Holidays, ed. by Martin and Person, pp. 60-72 (p. 62). 44 Proctor, pp. 62-63.




homoerotic subtext that requires unpacking. The slippage between Hilda's innocence and guilt is figured graphically in the image of her painted by an Italian artist who frequents the same galleries. The painting and its subsequent purchase by a 'picture-dealer' are described to the reader in detail: It represented Hilda as gazing, with sad and earnest horrour [sic] , at a blood-spot which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe. [. . .] By many connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci [...]. But the modern artist strenuously upheld the originality of his own picture, as well as the stainless purity of its subject, and chose to call it, (and was laughed at for his pains,) 'Innocence, dying of a Blood-stain!' (p. 330) When the artist takes the picture to the dealer, the latter tells him it would fetch a better price if he gave it ca more intelligible title', and argues: 'Looking at the face and expression of this fair Signorina, we seem to comprehend [. . .] that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles of the heart, to which young ladies are but too liable. But what is this Blood-stain? And what has Innocence to do with it? [. . .] The picture being now my property, I shall call it "The Signorina's Vengeance." She has stabbed her lover, over night, and is repenting it betimes, the next morning. So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very natural representation of a not uncommon fact.' (p. 331) This debate between artist and buyer symbolizes, perhaps, the tacit struggle between author and reader, and the vagaries of interpretation, while also drawing attention to the ambiguous titling of Hawthorne's own novel. However, on another level it also problematizes Hilda's sorrow and casts doubt on whether the stain that mars her innocence is caused by her own or another's actions or guilt. Furthermore, the picture-dealer's interpretation of the painting as that of a vengeful lover eroticizes the cause of Hilda's grief and the reasons behind it. The focus on the staining and spotting of Hilda's whiteness also hints at homoeroticism. Krafft-Ebing 'cited a hereditary taint [my emphasis]' as the cause of homosexuality, and the sexological 'stigma' attached to lesbianism, a word that is, as I point out elsewhere, 'associated with both stain and disease', suggests that the stains and spots that colour Hilda's conscience imply more than simply guilty knowledge of the murder.45

Similarly, Hilda's increasing obsession with the Virgin Mary as the novel progresses has significant connotations. Hilda is keeper of the Virgin's shrine that crowns the tower in which she lives; she lights the Virgin's lamp and tends the doves that flutter round it. In her grief she turns to the Virgin's image again and again. While she trims the lamp, she gazes 'at the sacred image', fancies 'a woman's tenderness responding to her gaze', and prays, seeking 'the sympathy of Divine Womanhood' (p. 332). Later, in her aimless wanderings around Rome, we are told that 'often, and long, Hilda lingered before the shrines and chapels

45 Patricia Pulham, Art and the Transitional Object in Vernon Lee's Supernatural Tales (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 83.



PATRICIA PULHAM 99

of the Virgin, and departed from them with reluctant steps' (p. 347), anticipat- ing Freud's Dora, who spends 'two hours in front of the Sistine Madonna, rapt in silent admiration' and who was herself in love with another woman.46 Yet we learn that Hilda 'never found just the Virgin Mother whom she needed', that she 'looked for [. . .] a face of celestial beauty, but human as well as heavenly, and with the shadow of past grief upon it; bright with immortal youth, yet matronly and motherly, and endowed with a queenly dignity, but infinitely tender' (p. 348). Hilda's quest is doomed to fail because, whether she knows it or not, it is Miriam she seeks.47 Miriam, 'a beautiful and attractive' woman, shares the perfect Virgin's 'celestial beauty', which is both 'human' and 'heavenly'. She carries a past sorrow, her own 'queenly dignity' is enough to inspire Kenyon to sculpt the Cleopatra,48 and prior to the murder she is tender and loving towards Hilda. Moreover, her affinity with the statue of Juno, mentioned above, endows her with maternal attributes.

In her discussion of the importance of the Virgin Mary for homosexual couples and same-sex communities, such as the Anglican sisterhoods established under the influence of Edward Pusey, Ruth Vanita writes: Mary, flying in the face of biology and heterosexual normatività is the exemplary figure for the odd lives of male and female saints who choose same-sex community over marriage [...]. It does not seem to me accidental that a liturgy to the Virgin is part of every ceremony of same-sex union unearthed by John Boswell; she is called upon to bless these unions along with Christ and other saints but is not invoked in the same way in heterosexual marriage services.49

The link between Hilda and same-sex sisterhoods has been established, but it is additionally worth noting that she is also referred to as a 'Saint', both prior to her acknowledgement of Kenyon's love and after, when we are told that, following her marriage, she herself will be 'enshrined and worshipped as a household Saint' (pp. 53, 461). It seems that Hilda, even as a bride, will mirror the Virgin Mary. Yet, paradoxically, towards the end of The Marble Faun Hilda the Virgin seemingly 'transforms' into a pagan statue of Venus.50

In a sense, Hilda is described in sculptural terms throughout the novel. She dresses in 'white' and is 'white-souled' (p. 202), displaying a whiteness that

46 Sigmund Freud, Case Histories 1: 'Dora' and 'Little Hans', trans, by Alix and James Strachey, ed. by Angela Richards, The Penguin Freud Library, 8 (London: Peneuin, 1077), 31-164 (pp. 13^-36, empasis original). 47 Nina Baym argues that Hilda's search for a mother fails because 'the mother is not a virgin' (' The Marble Faun' p. 368). 48 In chapter 31 Kenyon, waiting for Miriam, imagines her 'arrayed in queenly robes' (p. 279). 49 Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 8-9. Edward Pusey (1800-82) was associated with the Oxford Movement and High Anglicanism. 50 Theodore Ziolkowski notes that, as a result of Christianity's general demonization of the pagan, the Virgin Mary often replaces Venus in Christian versions of pagan myths. Interestingly, a reversal from Christian to pagan takes place here, thus complicating Hilda's 'virginity'. See Theodore Ziolkowski, Disenchanted Images: A Literary Iconology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 27.



ioo Sin, Sculpture, and Perversion in The Marble Faun

permeates to her core; the 'small, beautifully shaped hand [. . .] delicately sculptured in marble' by Kenyon functions synecdochally for the beautiful, delicate, yet rigid Hilda, whose white soul permits no sympathetic or empathetic understanding; Kenyon's devotion to his 'cold art' and sculptural objects that he perceives as 'being of so cold and pure a substance' mirror his devotion to the 'cold', 'white', and 'pure' Hilda (p. 390). Moreover, her affinity with Venus is prefigured by her doves, for doves are traditionally recognized as Venus- Aphrodite's birds.51 Her 'transformation' from Christian Virgin to pagan goddess is reinforced by the description of the marble Venus unearthed during Kenyon's walk on the Campagna. The moment of discovery is described in detail: Protruding from the loose earth [. . .] Kenyon beheld the fingers of a marble hand; it was still appended to its arm, and a little further search enabled him to find the other. Placing these limbs in what the nice adjustment of the fractures proved to be their true position, the poor, fragmentary woman forthwith showed that she retained her modest instincts to the last. [...]. For these long-buried hands immediately disposed themselves in the manner that nature prompts, as the antique artist knew, and as all the world has seen, in the Venus de' Medici.

'What a discovery is here!' thought Kenyon to himself. 'I seek for Hilda, and find a marble woman! Is the omen good or ill?'

[...]. It was either the prototype or a better repetition of the Venus of the Tribune. But those who have been dissatisfied with the small head, the narrow, soulless face, the button-hole eyelids, of that famous statue, and its mouth such as nature never moulded, should see the genial breadth of this far nobler and sweeter countenance. It is one of the few works of antique sculpture in which we recognize womanhood, and that, moreover, without prejudice to its divinity, (p. 42ß)52

Kenyon's eyes land, in the first instance, on 'the fingers of a marble hand', recalling the sculpted image of Hilda's marble hand. The focus on the Venus's 'womanhood' accompanied by 'modesty' and divinity also lead us back to the saintly Hilda. But we do not have to rely simply on our conjectures: Kenyon makes the connection explicit when he exclaims, '"What a discovery is here! [. . .] I seek for Hilda, and find a marble woman!'" (p. 423). The statue's 'snowy lustre', mirroring Hilda's whiteness, only serves to strengthen the link between these two objects of desire (p. 424). Nina Baym points out that Miriam and Donatello, whom she refers to as 'Venus and Eros in the flesh', are the original discoverers of the statue, and the encounter marks the renewal of their love.53 Nevertheless, it seems significant that Hilda, represented by the Venus - a

51 Vernon Lee, 'Dionea', in Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales, ed. by Catherine Maxwell and Patricia Pulham (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2006), pp. 77-104 (p. 81 n. 2). 52 While in Rome, Hawthorne took a trip to the Campagna with William Wetmore Story in order to visit a newly excavated statue that was considered the model for the Medici Venus that was (and still is) displayed in the Tribune at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Brodhead notes that the statue 'was still so freshly uncovered that Story, like Kenyon, had to brush the earth out of its marble lips' (Hawthorne, p. 483, ch. xlvi, n. 1). óá Baym, 'The Marble Faun , p. 373.



PATRICIA PULHAM 101

marble double of Miriam's rather more earthy version of the goddess - is at the heart of this rediscovery of their desire for each other. As at the moment of Donatello's crime, the union between Donatello and Miriam is mirrored by the figurative union of Miriam and Hilda.

These slippages of identity and sexuality are explored implicitly and explicitly through notions of the carnivalesque that recur, both in actual and in sculptural form, throughout The Marble Faun. As mentioned above, Sheldon Liebman identifies the sarcophagus as a significant literal and metaphorical motif in Hawthorne's novel. He observes that in chapter io the sarcophagus becomes ca metaphor for the sylvan dance'.54 While Miriam and Donatello walk through the Borghese gardens, they meet a 'festal' crowd and join the festivities (p. 89). The narrator tells us: As they followed one another in a wild ring of mirth, it seemed the realization of one of those bas-reliefs where a dance of nymphs, satyrs, or bacchanals is twined around the circle of an antique vase; or it was like the sculptured scene on the front and sides of a sarcophagus, where, as often as any other device, a festive procession mocks the ashes and white bones that are treasured up within. You might take it for a marriage pageant; but after a while, if you look at these merry-makers, following them from end to end of the marble coffin, you doubt whether their gay movement is leading them to a happy close, (p. 88)

The image is repeated in the frescoes of an antique saloon in Donatello's ancestral home, which depict a faded 'wreath of dancing figures' that seem 'like the ghosts of dead and buried joys' (p. 226). According to Liebman, the carnival in chapter 49 of The Marble Faun represents a 'final sarcophagus scene' that functions as 'a marriage pageant for Kenyon and Hilda, and a funeral march for Donatello and Miriam';55 but it also acts as a closing comment on those carnivalesque reversals of gender and sexuality that inform Hawthorne's novel. As Kenyon works his way through the carnival crowds, he is accosted by 'Fantastic figures', including 'Five strapping damsels' that are clearly men, and by 'all other imaginable kinds of monstrosity and exaggeration' (p. 446). This scene, which for Kenyon is 'like a feverish dream', anticipates Aschenbach's 'terrible dream' in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (19 12), in which all is 'tumult and frenzied dancing', and links Hawthorne's images of fearful revel to the Dionysian bacchanal, already intimated by Donatello's association with Bacchus.56

The recurrence of Dionysian imagery in a novel concerned with the Apollonian art of sculpture compels examination. Discussing the contrasts between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, Camille Paglia writes:

54 Liebman, 'Design of The Marble Faun', p. 75. 55 Liebman, p. 76. 5b Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Stories, ed. and trans, by David Luke (London: Vintage, 1998), pp. 197-267 (pp. 259-60).




The Apollonian and Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. [. . .] Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is empathie, the sympathetic emotion transporting us into other people, other places, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separatism of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism - heedless indiscrimi- nateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism - frigidity and aggression of the eye, pétrification of objects.57 In The Marble Faun Donatelle) 's 'identification' with the pagan statue affords him a licence that transports him metaphorically into 'other times' and results in a Dionysian explosion of 'energy', 'hysteria', and 'emotionalism'.58 In contrast, Kenyon remains aloof, uninvolved, observing the complex emotions of his friends with a voyeuristic interest. Moreover, his art relies on a 'frigidity and aggression of the eye' and results in sculpture, a figurai 'pétrification of objects'.59

I began this essay by suggesting that the shift from the novel's British title, Trans- formation, to The Marble Faun charts a movement that takes place within the novel itself. I suggest that, while Miriam and Donatello have their sculptural counterparts, their 'energy', 'ecstasy', and 'emotionalism' exceed Kenyon's Apollonian attempts to still them in sculpture. This presents Hawthorne with a problem: how, then, to contain the sexual fluidity they represent? The solution he arrives at is to substitute the volatile, metamorphic figures of Miriam and Donatello with Kenyon, the 'man of marble' and his 'marble' bride-to-be, the saintly Hilda. In The Marble Faun 'the permissions of the carnival are but a means toward a greater surveillance, one that works toward a regularization of desire as an essential part of the creation of the new, secure self'.60 The carnival, functioning as 'a marriage pageant for Kenyon and Hilda, and a funeral march for Donatello and Miriam',61 simultaneously rids Hawthorne of his unruly characters and ossifies the union between Kenyon and Hilda. It buries their own sexual ambiguities and, symbolically, those of Miriam and Donatello in a literary sarcophagus that mirrors Keats's Grecian Urn on which 'marble men and maidens' form a 'Cold Pastoral' of Apollonian art.

57 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (New York: Vintage, 1991), P-96- . .. 58 Donatello's 'illness' and his retreat from Rome to his ancestral home suggest a somatic and melancholic response to his violent action. 59 Interestingly, Hawthorne's narrator refers to busts sculpted by Kenyon as pétrifications oí a vain sell- estimate' (p. 118). See also Auerbach, 'Executing the Model', p. 107. 60 Martin, '"An Awful Freedom'", p. 38. 61 Liebman, 'Design of The Marble Faun', p. 76.



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