5 - Hawthorne, modernity, and the literary sketch

Summary

In “Hawthorne and the Twilight of Romance,”Roy Harvey Pearce claims that “in The Marble Faun . . . the sketch becomes the structural core of the novel itself and dominates its form.” This is not, however, a felicitous development in Pearce's view, for he has just described the author as having been subject throughout his career to the “danger”of falling prey to the genre that “so charmed Hawthorne's age.” For Pearce, this seduction story represents the ruin of an author who succumbs in Italy to what he has long flirted with - the “easy way”: the “semi-melodramatic,” “quasiphilosophical” form in which “the writer takes no definite stand.” Since it was first published in 1948, Pearce's essay has remained one of the most influential standard interpretations of The Marble Faun and, though garnering less attention, one of the more fully developed discussions of a constitutive relationship between Hawthorne's literary sketches and his romances. The literary-historical narrative Pearce fashions emerges from his effort to pinpoint the difference between what he perceives to be the successful projects of the first three romances and the “inadequacy and failure” of The Marble Faun. Unlike the earlier romances and “great tales,” in which “form, materials, and meaning cohere, each implicating and demanding the other,” The Marble Faun ends “with ‘half-developed hints’ – apparently the more desirable because half-developed.”