The marble faun, paperback/nathaniel hawthorne

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 Miriams unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy.

Hawthornes 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 authors 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.

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