The Marble Faun

The Marble Faun is the last of the four major romances by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1860; in Britain it appeared as Transformation.

The book is a novel about Americans abroad, and it was among the first to ask what European art and history do to a person raised somewhere else: Hawthorne's concern is not with Italy's politics but with cathedrals, galleries, catacombs and the moral weight that centuries of images give to a place. It is also a book about transgression, like The Scarlet Letter, and it handles its central crime the way Hawthorne handles guilt in general, by letting the act happen off the page and following the consequence instead. Miriam is compared by the narrator to a series of historical and biblical women; Hilda's judgements are unyielding; Kenyon is a rationalist who cannot paint what he sees into an argument; and Donatello changes in a way that connects the novel to the story of the fall of man. The mixture of fable, pastoral, Gothic novel and guidebook was unusual even in its own period, and the book's ending refuses to explain everything.