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I loved Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables; I thought both had brilliant characters and writing. In the case of Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, I loved her strength and abiding compassion. And in The House of Seven Gables I loved the old maid Hepzibah and her cousin Phoebe. I got through Blithedale Romance and found the character Zenobia fascinating at first, although disappointing in the end. I even got through Fanshawe, a none-too-good first novel Hawthorne disowned. But Fanshawe was little more than a hundred pages, and the other two novels two hundred odd pages--The Marble Faun is 402 pages, and by page 150, I was feeling it was going on forever. Mind you, I rather loved Miriam--rather rare to have a strong female Jewish character in 19th Century fiction. Perhaps Hawthorne took a page from Sir Walter Scott's Rebecca in Ivanhoe? For that matter it was refreshing to see two women artists who were living--and making a living--independently. But then Hawthorne rather reversed that strong depiction of women with passages like this: Hilda’s faculty of genuine admiration is one of the rarest to be found in human nature; and let us try to recompense her in kind by admiring her generous self-surrender, and her brave, humble magnanimity in choosing to be the handmaid of those old magicians, instead of a minor enchantress within a circle of her own. The handmaid of Raphael, whom she loved with a virgin’s love! Would it have been worth Hilda’s while to relinquish this office for the sake of giving the world a picture or two which it would call original; pretty fancies of snow and moonlight; the counterpart in picture of so many feminine achievements in literature! Riiight. That's how we should describe Hawthorne's distaff contemporaries Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot--as writers of pretty fancies of snow and moonlight who'd have done better to be handmaidens to their better halves. I heard that song before with Zenobia. And many of the descriptions of Rome and of the art is lovely--but what does it say that I found such digressions more interesting than the main narrative so transparently about a modern retelling of the Fall of Adam. And if how Hawthorne depicts Jews is commendable for his time, how he portrays Catholics is just abominable--even if understandable for his time. And worst of all is the "marble faun" of the story, Donatello. If ever a metaphor was overdone... So, yeah, count me as not a fan of this.

[These notes were made in 1983:]. I found this a very pleasant read, and with more substance than I anticipated from a preliminary brush through the first chapters. It was written in Italy, and abounds in that luxurious description of old artworks and older buildings which seems to overtake so many visitors to that country. In Hawthorne's case, it's done well, and linked in to the themes of the story. The old preoccupations - the effect of hidden sin - are all there, as the method of suggesting without actually giving us something supernatural (cf. the red A). The characters are far from realistic, tho' they are equally far from types. They are somehow abstracted - not a single quality personified (tho' Hilda comes close to being Purity) - but a number of qualities lumped together under a single name. The effect is curiously successful in places. Miriam's Dark Past is much insisted upon, and left unnecessarily dark (as tho' a mystery writer had no solution to his own mystery), but there's no doubt the atmosphere of brooding evil is well evoked; like its opposite, indeed, that mindless, sensual animal joy which Hawthorne links to pastoral Greece and prelapsarian Eden. (The coming of knowledge is a Fall indeed - Donatello pushes his enemy over a precipice!) The charm is somehow elusive, but it certainly exists.