ABSTRACT
Nathaniel Hawthorne's principal theme is the American attempt to form a new society, and the tension between past and present, European experience and American optimism. Many discussions of The Marble Faun, indeed of Hawthorne's fiction in general, centre round the idea of the fortunate fall, which is in this novel explicitly stated. in The Marble Faun as in The House of the Seven Gables this sense operates in a vacuum, conveyed through a personal crisis which becomes prescriptive symbolism, a myth of Europe, and Europe and America, unattached to the historical moment of its setting. Hawthorne's treatment of the fortunate fall is part of the general operation of this sense, which again is part of the book's characteristic tone of having it both ways. The commonest version of the fortunate fall talked about one indeed that turns up as frequently in the novel itself is that we must sin in order to have moral and spiritual growth.
