The fragility-and the durability-of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the "Marble Faun," Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy.
Hawthorne's 'International Novel' dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the 'authentic' and the 'fake' in life as in art. The author's evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favorite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society.
In this novel set in Victorian England, a wealthy orphan named Colley Trevelyan is kidnapped from his home and forced to live at the ghastly Broggin Home for Boys. The proprietors of the home, who consider Colley to be just another orphan, force him to work in a factory, and he is shunned by the other orphans. When a twist of fate wins Colley the friendship of the other boys, he finds comradeship for the first time in his life. Colley believes he has been left at the home while his kidnappers collect ransom from his guardians, but he has no idea that a far more nefarious plan has been set in motion.
- Genre: Fiction + Literature Themes, Fiction + Literature Genres
- Subgenre: Classics, Legal + Courtroom + Crime, Love + Relationships + Sex, Conflicts + Dualities, Human Qualities + Behavior, Types of Characters, Literary Genres + Types of Novels, Religion + Beliefs
- Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr
- Pages: 375
- Edition: Reissue
- Language: English
- Format: paperback
- Release Date: February 15, 2009
- Date Published: February 15, 2009
- Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne