Hawthorne's Ovidian Transformations

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s last completed romance was initially titled Transformation before it was published as The Marble Faun in America. This article explores the Ovidian implications of that title, both suggested and later rejected by Hawthorne. Ovid had made transformation synonymous with the creation of art, through stories such as Pygmalion’s sculpting of a statue that he then brings to life. Hawthorne wrote his own version of that story and adopted in general an Ovidian aesthetic: the artist is a ‘sculptor’ who shapes his materials, transforming reality into fiction. While writing The Marble Faun, however, Hawthorne encountered in Italy’s world of sculpture the reality behind his metaphor for fiction in ways that challenged his past assumptions. In Ovid’s Rome Hawthorne was troubled by marble statues painted to match life, by fauns who traditionally could not be transformed, and by the loss of Arcadia to time’s inevitable unfolding, issues that resonated with the transformations America was experiencing at that very time, on the eve of the Civil War. Ovid, the counter-cultural poet who rejected an Augustan agenda of morality in favour of multitudinous, multicultural life, proved in the end too challenging a master for Hawthorne to emulate

Arcadia · Art · Art history · Literature · Metaphor · Morality · Romance · Sculpture · Statue · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · Philosophy

• Executing the Model

  Jonathan Auerbach•ELH•1980

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• "Living Sculptures"

  Leonard Barkan•ELH•1981

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