In the twenty years since Perry Miller's death there have been many new beginnings in the field he inspired. We have witnessed an impressive recovery of the Puritans' gift for metaphoric adventure, and a number of town and family studies have given us a fuller sense of Puritan life “from the bottom up.” More recently, there have appeared some sensitive explorations of “lay piety,” and of the expressive significance of artifacts, shaped space, dress, gravestones, and the like — “evidence as powerful as any sermon of the deeper values that existed in tension at the core of seventeenth-century New England culture.” Yet despite these advances and the many spirited revisions of Miller's own views on more traditional issues in intellectual history such as the precise nature of “non-separating congregationalism,” the validity of “declension” as a way of describing generational change, and the importance of Ramistic rationalism to Puritan thought, a suspicion is in the air that we may be stalled.

The town of Concord, Massachusetts, is widely celebrated in American culture as a pastoral place. It was the home of the Minutemen, the “embattled farmers” who fought the Redcoats at the Old North Bridge and launched the War for Independence. More than a half-century later, it became the bucolic center of the American Renaissance, where Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau waged their own revolutions of the spirit. In these terms, Concord readily plays its part within the longstanding American opposition between country and city, serving as the timeless small town, the symbolic guardian of that rural simplicity and love of liberty so regularly invoked in times of crisis to recall a complex urban-industrial nation to its roots. Even today, when the town numbers some 16,000 people, Concordians like to picture their community as a “climate for freedom.”

The Marble Faun's plot is alleged to be “Gothic” and impenetrable, its topography and history “guide-book,” its author external to his subject, too foreign (that is, American), too old (fifty-five), tired and ill to have had anything but a tourist's or artists' colony view of the Roman and Tuscan setting. Anyway, this charge runs, Hawthorne wrote Romances, fictions distanced from actuality and history, not outward-referring novels anchored in a context of exterior realities.

In fact Hawthorne sets the action of his Roman novel in a complex field of Italian history, past and present. There is not only an evocation of the pre-classical and imperial history of Rome and its Christian, Medieval and Renaissance periods; the status of the Papally-dominated, Frenchgarrisoned city is carefully delineated. Hawthorne mobilises not only the panoramic history which has been sensed but insufficiently discriminated but also the contemporaneous politics of the Roman, and Tuscan, states. Nor is the novel set in no particular time, but in fact on a very precise time-scale, and it may even be datable, from Monday, 5 April 1858, to Thursday, 3 March 1859 (see the Appendix at the end of this essay, pp. 403–4). The Marble Faun's contemporaneity remains unacknowledged.