The Marble Faun
Marble Faun, The,a novel by Hawthorne , published 1860 (in England as Transformation). It is the product of Hawthorne's two years in Italy; the scene is laid in Rome, and the title is taken from the resemblance of one of the principal characters, Count Donatello, to the Marble Faun of Praxiteles.
Donatello is in love with the liberated young American art student Miriam, who is being persecuted by a mysterious stranger—a ‘dusty, death-scented apparition’, with whom she has some guilty connection. Roused to sudden fury when encountering her with him on a moonlight expedition, Donatello murders him, with her unspoken assent, thus binding them together in a relationship ‘cemented by blood’. A sub-plot describes the relationship of a sculptor, Kenyon, and Miriam's art student friend Hilda, ‘the Dove’; Hilda, although herself totally innocent, feels herself under a ‘mysterious shadow of guilt’, by connection...
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