Page 10 - Demo

5.NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE NOVELIST AND DARK ROMANTIC
From Nathaniel Hawthorne, The French and Italian Notebooks, ed. By Thomas Woodson (Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press)
The Grand Tour phenomenon evolved over the centuries and by the late 19th century, many American of Puritan and Protestant background begun to come to Italy and especially to Rome to, once again, witness the creation of Antiquity and the Renaissance, but also to discover the very different landscapes the country offered, the warmer climate, and a more exotic environment. This is much of what Nathaniel Hawthorne hoped to experience when he first came to Italy in early 1858.
No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.
For the fairly contained, New-England raised Hawthorne, Italy indeed represented ‘the exotic’ and chaotic unstructured stratification of ‘layers of history and art’ piled atop one another. As we see throughout his last novel The Marble Faun Italy, from its paintings and sculptures to its architecture and annual Carnival rituals, proves to be too overwhelming for Hawthorne, too confusing, too uncontained. When Hawthorne wrote it in 1860, eight years after his last novel had been published, it was after a period in which he spent four years serving his country as American Consul for Liverpool and then eighteen months in Italy as a tourist (partly encouraged by his wife’s enthusiasm for Europe and its artistic treasures). This can be a frustrating novel, in so many ways; it is almost as if Hawthorne was so overwhelmed by the ‘fever’ of Rome that the novel he chose to set there barely comes together and seems more like a fable or a dream set upon the backdrop of Rome and its countryside. So while in many ways The Marble Faun is a wonderful reflection of a Grand Tour experience and of an American’s time in Rome in the late 1850s, it is also a heavy-handed warning to himself and others not to stray too far into the dark, exotic warmth of Italy, and the odd creatures that inhabit this ancient, overgrown land. home. ‘For ifyou come hither in summer, and stray through these glades in the golden sunset, Fever walks arm in arm with you, and Death awaits you at the end of the dim vista’ he wrote describing Villa Borghese.
The description of the Carnival 1858 and 1859 is the climax of the novel. ‘Little as I have enjoyed the Carnival, I think I could make quite a brilliant sketch ofit, without very widely departing from truth.’ The Carnival seemed to him overwhelming, frightening, grotesque, dirt and unseemly. ‘To own the truth, the Carnival is alive, this present year, only because it has existed through centuries gone by. It is traditionary, not actual. If the decrepit and melancholy city smiles, and laughs broadly, indeed, at Carnival-time, it is a half-conscious effort, like our self-deceptive pretence ofjollity at a threadbare joke’.