ABSTRACT
The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s perplexing last novel, brings together writing and his abiding interest in sculpture, and is Hawthorne’s fullest contemplation of his own writing through that rival art. That toward the end of his life he should have found himself in Italy, literally surrounded by sculpture, appears a destiny fulfilled. Hawthorne “sketched out” this novel, as he puts it in the Preface, amidst the great classical sculpture and monuments of Rome. There and in his excursions to Florence he also absorbed centuries of Renaissance art. He met many of the American sculptors based in the two cities, witnessing the attempts of Hiram Powers and the late Thomas Crawford to sculpt America. It was an enterprise, as we have seen, that had already entered tangentially into his fictions, from Drowne’s “figurehead,” with its strong “Yankee” roots, to the classical ambitions of “A Select Party” and the natural sculpture of “The Great Stone Face.” There he was, fresh from his role as American representative in Britain, facing the attempts of his compatriots to embody his nation and its political figureheads in marble, and yet in the novel his American sculptor does not attempt a monument: he produces a bust, a bust of a private and obscure Italian named Donatello, and he leaves it unfinished.
