ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Elizabeth Inchbald's Nature and Art and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to suggest that these books' preoccupation with the nature of right and wrong – with the moral order – exemplifies a didactic subtext accessible in the Romantic moral romance on a symbolic, quasi-allegorical level. It begins with a brief overview of Romantic attitudes toward religion combined with a discussion of Inchbald's and Hawthorne's personal experiences and views. The chapter examines Inchbald's Nature and Art, and particularly focuses on clerical hypocrisy, to suggest the corruption that Inchbald believed to be problematic to adherents of the Anglican Church. It turns to Hawthorne's The Marble Faun to show how its depiction of the effects of family guilt on subsequent generations exposes the corruption of Catholicism and, less directly, Puritanism. Hawthorne is content only with an individually constructed moral order.
