Novel: The Marble Faun

Overview
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1860 novel The Marble Faun, published in Britain as Transformation, follows four young artists in Rome whose lives are upended by a single act of violence. Anchored in the antiquities and galleries of the Eternal City, the story blends romance, psychological study, and moral allegory, using a classical statue, the Faun of Praxiteles, as its central emblem of innocence, temptation, and the dawning of moral knowledge.

Plot
Two American expatriates, Hilda, a devout copyist of Old Masters, and Kenyon, a reflective sculptor, befriend Miriam, a brilliant painter with a troubled, obscure past, and Donatello, a lighthearted young Italian count whose cheerful instincts and rumored pointed ears give him a faun-like aura. The quartet roams Rome’s museums, catacombs, and ruins, as the friends ponder art’s truths and the shadowy border between sin and beauty. Miriam is menaced by a figure known only as the Model, a grim man tied to her mysterious history, who stalks her through the city’s labyrinth of streets and chapels.

During a nocturnal walk near the Capitoline’s ancient precipice, Miriam and Donatello confront the Model. In a charged instant, prompted by fear, passion, and Miriam’s desperate glance, Donatello seizes the pursuer and hurls him from the height to his death. The deed seals an irrevocable bond between the pair while shattering Donatello’s Edenic gaiety. Where he once seemed a creature of pure instinct, he now feels the sting of conscience; his face alters, his joy dims, and the metaphorical “faun” in him gives way to a man burdened by knowledge.

Unseen by the culprits, Hilda witnesses the crime from a nearby window. Her Protestant rectitude recoils from the sin yet cannot betray Miriam. Conscience isolates her; she recoils from her art, mistrusts Catholic confession, and becomes the keeper of a secret she refuses to voice. Shortly after, Hilda vanishes from her tower near the Spanish Steps. Meanwhile, Kenyon, in love with Hilda and baffled by her disappearance, travels to Donatello’s ancestral estate at Monte Beni in Tuscany. There, amid sunlit vineyards and Etruscan tombs, he perceives the depth of Donatello’s remorse. The countryside’s pagan cheer cannot dispel the weight of the act; the friends speak of guilt, justice, and the redemptive possibility of suffering.

Hilda reappears after a period of confinement and protection within a convent, having sought spiritual counsel yet refused to reveal another’s sin. The Pope’s gentle blessing steadies her conscience without granting easy absolution. Back in Rome, the four meet again. Miriam accepts the doom the crime has woven into her life; Donatello, transformed by remorse, renounces flight and yields himself to the law, embracing penitence as the only path toward inner restoration. Hilda, her purity tested yet clarified, recovers the freedom to paint, and Kenyon’s steadfast affection finds quiet reciprocity, hinting at a future together.

Characters and Symbol
Miriam embodies the magnetic pull of passion and the impenetrable opacity of personal history. Donatello begins as the living counterpart of the Marble Faun and becomes the novel’s emblem of the Fall: a passage from innocence to moral awareness through sin. Hilda personifies uncompromising conscience and the difficulty of being righteous in a compromised world, while Kenyon offers humane sympathy and the artist’s measured reason. The statue of the Faun, half-beast, half-man, mirrors the human soul poised between instinct and ethical responsibility.

Themes and Setting
Rome’s galleries, churches, and ruins provide a theater where pagan beauty and Christian morality vie for authority. The novel probes whether art can purify or merely reflect our fallen state; whether confession heals without truth; and whether suffering can transmute guilt into grace. Ambiguity is essential: Hawthorne withholds full explanations of Miriam’s past and the Model’s identity, insisting that moral experience is less a solved puzzle than a lived transformation.