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History and Romance, Sympathy and Uncertainty: The Moral of the Stones in Hawthorne's Marble Faun

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

John Michael
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Abstract

Hawthorne attempted not only to change his readers' understanding of historical events but also to undermine their complacency about historical understanding. In The Marble Faun, he questions the positivistic assumptions and complacent moralism of nineteenth-century historiography by representing sympathy and estrangement as principles of knowledge. The story of Kenyon and Hilda, Miriam, Donatello, and the model, set amid the ruins of Rome, indicates that both the truths of history and the truths of the human heart are produced in narratives that reflect the affective links between the tellers of tales and the objects described. For Hawthorne history and romance are not morally or epistemologically distinct. Sympathy does not solve the problem of historical knowledge but reposes it in a form more proper to the ambiguities of romance as Hawthorne used the genre than to the certainties of history as traditionally conceived.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 103 , Issue 2 , March 1988 , pp. 150 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1988

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