Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture, and Romance-Writing in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun

Abstract

The recent fashion of applying sophisticated theoretical models-linguistic, psychoanalytic, anthropological-to study of literature has led corollary theoretical preoccupation with these models themselves. Critics as diverse as Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson have devoted great deal of attention problematic use of models constructed analyze and approximate way we think. Amidst all of this self-conscious discussion of modes of representation' and metacommentary,2 however, critics tend forget that writers too have great deal say about models they employ help them forge their fictions. In his last completed romance, The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne suggests role artistic models play in his writing by presenting living who is murdered at crucial moment in narrative. The Model's destruction not only sheds light on creative activity of painting and sculpture which takes place within novel, but also illuminates Hawthorne's own creative act, process of plotting romance itself. By transforming metaphor to execute model into central event of novel, Hawthorne turns his romance into self-interpreting confession that compels reader participate in fiction. In preface The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne suggests that romance-writer must conjure up a neutral territory, somewhere between real world and fairy-land, where Actual and may meet, and each imbue itself with nature of other.3 In his preface The Marble Faun, Hawthorne locates distinction between the Actual and Imaginary in terms of difference between America and Italy: