Looking around The Marble Faun: Visuality, Authorship, and Authority

Abstract

Abstract:Nathaniel Hawthorne's last and longest novel, The Marble Faun, was his most popular in the nineteenth century, but it has long troubled literary critics and scholars. This essay by an art historian uses philosopher VilémFlusser's theories of modern forms of visuality to explore how this book about Americans in Italy functioned both as text and as a physical object.Flusser's analysis of the challenge to forms of authority linked to authorship enacted by modern visual technologies illuminates the descriptive digressions and illogical plot that critics complained of in Hawthorne's text, and suggest why this book, in the so-called Tauchnitz edition, lent itself to extravagant practices of binding and extra-illustration.Emphasizing the narration's many invitations to interpretation and revision, the essay concludes by analyzing a surprising omission from Hawthorne's story structured around Roman tourist sites: the Sistine Chapel. Taking up critiques of Michelangelo's frescos by Hawthorne and his Anglophone Protestant contemporaries, the essay argues that The Marble Faun proposes itself as a reformulation of this famous text-based artwork in ways that engage mental habits that supplant linear reading with looking around.