ABSTRACT
Sculpture is at once a visible and a hidden presence in the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, not only one of the major writers of the emerging United States of America of the nineteenth century but also one of its diplomats charged with representing its face to the world. Sculpture is the subject of Hawthorne’s last published novel, The Marble Faun, and of several short pieces, “Drowne’s Wooden Image,” “The Great Stone Face,” and “The Snow-Image.” It appears in “The Hall of Fantasy,” with its statues and busts, its “pavement of white marble” and “fantastic pillars,” and in the castle in the air of “A Select Party,” with its room lined with ideal sculpture. In “Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent,” it lurks behind the figure of Herkimer, a sculptor. It partakes of the dark allegories of “The Birth-mark,” through its Pygmalion figure, the scientist Aylmer, and its allusion to “an Eve of Powers,” and of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (a story filled with the sculpted stone of Renaissance Italy) through the image of Rappaccini as a sculptor observing the figures whose fate he has shaped. And in the allegories of “The Man of Adamant” and “Ethan Brand,” the metaphor is literalized in Richard Digby’s turning to stone and in Brand’s marble heart-petrified during his selfcremation-a symbol of his cold-hearted experiment with another human soul. We find sculpture as a symbol of exposure in the statuesque image of Hester on the “pedestal” of the scaffold, and in the more conventional trope of the “mask” donned by the heroines of The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance. In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne uses the mask again as metaphor, only to break through it in the extraordinary concreteness of Kenyon’s unfinished bust of Donatello.
