Hawthorne, Sculpture, and the Question of American Art

Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860) ends with the image of an unfinished bust of a young man who is on trial for murder. Set in Rome and published on the eve of the American Civil War, the novel's closing figure simultaneously evokes America's potential and the threat of decay.Deanna Fernie's beautifully written and intellectually rewarding book analyses the recurring motif of the fragment in Hawthorne's fiction, specifically its double trajectory towards past and future, to trace Hawthorne's lifelong engagement with American art. Juxtaposed throughout Hawthorne's writings are unfinished and ruined images, from the rough-hewn figurehead of 'Drowne's Wooden Image' (1844), to the tattered letter 'A' in the unfinished loft of the Custom House in The Scarlet Letter (1850). The tension between the formed and unformed permits Hawthorne to interrogate the origins of American art and how it can be made distinct from European models. At the same time, Hawthorne shapes the American novel, developing literature's special capacities to express irresolution and transformation. Fernie establishes the intellectual contexts for her study through a discussion of the eighteenth-century fascination with ruins and fragments revealed in British and Continental literature. Her book will be an important text not only for American literature scholars but for anyone interested in British and Continental Romanticism and the intersection of art and literature.