Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1992 Community Versus the Imperial Mind: Images of Civil Strife in Hawthorne's "The aM rble Faun". Henry Michael w Russell Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Russell, Henry Michael w, "Community Versus the Imperial Mind: Images of Civil Strife in Hawthorne's "The aM rble Faun"." (1992). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5353. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5353 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 COMMUNITY VERSUS THE IMPERIAL MIND: IMAGES OF CIVIL STRIFE IN HAWTHORNE'S THE MARBLE FAUN A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Henry M.W. Russell B.A., Princeton University, 1976 .A., The University of South Carolina, 1981 May 1992 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Debts of intellectual gratitude are always enormous, unpayable, and entailed upon the next generations. Nevertheless it is a pleasure to acknowledge the great contribution made to this work, its conception, development, and style by Professor Lewis P. Simpson. His breadth of scholarship, meditative tutelage, precision of thought, intellectual integrity, and courtesy give inspiring example for a lifetime of work. My gratitude is further owed to Dr. Kevin Cope, whose analytic irony helped me to remember that form is always philosophy and that even intellectual wrong is transitory. Dr. James Olney's daily example of generosity and courtesy makes the university seem as if it can live up to its own ideals. My especial thanks to Dr. Charles Bigger and Dr, Mary Sirridge for their willingness to help with this project and for the incomparable gifts of Plato and Aristotle. I am grateful to the Alumni Council of Louisiana State University for the generous support which made my education possible. Finally, I am very blessed to have a wife, Crystal, whose patience and impatience have been moral and material aids in all my works. TABLE OF CONTENTS E3E ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................... ii ABSTRACT ........................................................ V INTRODUCTION ........................................ 1 CHAPTER I On the Edge of a Precipice: Hawthorne and the American Situation in the 1850s................................. 13 II Hawthorne's Sense of Rome: Emblems of Order and Disorder.................... 29 A. Muses, Statues and Civil Unrest-. 29 B. A Curious Grouping............... 41 C. Symbolic Locations: Two Pontiffs and Saint Paul................. 44 D. Beatrice Cenci and Joanna of Aragon.......................... 52 E. A Fortress, Civil War, and Civic Virtue.......................... 56 III The Consequences of Natural Self-Reliance 72 A. Words are Signs of Natural Facts........................... 72 B. Natural Facts are the Symbols of Spiritual Facts................ 84 C. It Demands Something Godlike in Him Who Has Cast Off the Common Motives of Humanity 88 D. Friendship and Holiness: Carbuncles and Pearls.......... 95 IV Felix Culpa and Children Eager to Learn.. 109 A . Felix Culpa? ..................... 109 B. Miriam and Margaret: Freedom, Feminism, and Slavery.......... 115 C. Fauns and Slaves................. 125 D. Masters and Nominalist Liberation 13 2 V The Saint, The Virgin, and Kenyon........ 143 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS (continued) Gage VI Gothicism and White Light.................. 175 A. The Menorah and Saint Michael.... 176 B. Ruskin and the Gothic Cathedral.. 180 C. The Cathedral of the World...... 186 D. Restoring the Golden Bowl?...... 191 E. The Pantheon and Transparent Eyeballs....................... 199 EPILOGUE .......................................... 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................... 209 VITA .............................................. 218 iv ABSTRACT Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun allegorically represents the crisis of civil order in the American Republic in the 1850s, foreshadowing the Civil War that erupted a year after the novel's publication. Hawthorne's last completed romance, set in Rome, suggests Americans must judge themselves against the community and continuity embodied in the European culture they had recently cast off. Challenging Emerson's doctrine that man may have an original relationship to history and the Creator, Hawthorne undermines the Founders' great idea: that an assembly of men could discover and formulate— in an act of the human mind— self-evident, inalienable rights that govern political and social relations. The first and second chapters place Hawthorne and the four protagonists of the novel in the historical context of civil strife. Chapter Three shows Miriam as an Emersonian, bound only to her intuitions, embodying millennial impulses which threaten to tear society apart. Chapter Four suggests multiple ironic links between Miriam's leading Donatello into the murder of her Model and the actions of Transcendental thinkers who supported both the Italian Risoraimento and the American Abolitionist struggle. Hawthorne poses images of communal response and penance against this perfectionist violence. The fifth chapter describes Hilda's shunning of Miriam as one expression of communal obligations to her, followed by other self- sacrificial acts. Hilda seeks and creates community, combining obedience to transcendent value with human norms in a way that associates her with St. Hilda of Whitby and the Virgin Mary. Kenyon's associations with his American and British namesakes are likewise explored. The sixth chapter examines metaphors of the gothic cathedral and Saint Peter's Basilica as models of communal perception. The Pantheon is employed as a contrasting metaphor of a pagan, isolating character. The cathedral is the climactic metaphor for community in The Marble Faun, the image of macrocosmic harmony, just as the anticipated marriage of Kenyon and Hilda establishes microcosmic harmony. The multiple works of art in the novel thus create a set of alternative visions that unite the claims of the personal and the communal; the American and the European; the temporal and the eternal. INTRODUCTION The apparent distance maintained by Nathaniel Hawthorne from the issues that inflamed the passions of his contemporaries, especially the slavery question, has displeased some readers. Jean Yellin finds "a strategy of avoidance and denial" which demonstates that Hawthorne "could not acknowledge the necessary engagement of politics and art, of life and letters— the engagement that Emerson demanded of his generation, and of all generations."1 On the contrary, Hawthorne was so concerned about the relation of the individual mind with the political and the moral world that it led him to attack Emerson's version of engagement. Hawthorne saw Emerson's ideas not as genuine engagement but as withdrawal into the isolation of mind acting only to remake the world in its self-image. In The Marble Faun he strongly resists Emerson's call to abandon Old World values for American millenialism. Nathaniel Hawthorne did not fully encounter Emerson's bogey-men, "the courtly muses of Europe," until he went to Liverpool in 1853 as American consul. When his consular term was ended in 1857, he moved to Italy, where he remained until 1860. Here he wrote the first draft of