FAIRY PRECINCTS OF THE REAL: RECOVERING THE MIRACULOUS IN HAWTHORNE’S THE MARBLE FAUN

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FAIRY PRECINCTS OF THE REAL: RECOVERING THE MIRACULOUS IN HAWTHORNE’S THE MARBLE FAUN

While Hawthorne scholars have paid relatively little attention to the author’s interest in and use of fairy tales, others define him as a major figure in that area. The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680-1860 claims that “the most significant single development in the popular knowledge of mythology … may be attributed to the work and subsequent influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Kingsley, and Thomas Bulfinch” (505)–and Hawthorne laid the groundwork for the other two. Hawthorne even has his own entry in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. (1) Hawthorne’s groundbreaking accomplishment was that he “treated the myths as modern fairy stories,” making them accessible to Victorian audiences (Feldman and Richardson 506). Given Hawthorne’s fascination with fairy tales and fairy land, it is rather incredible how little critical attention is paid to them in Hawthorne studies. While Hawthorne scholarship covers a wide spectrum of perspectives, important areas of recent interest about Hawthorne are represented in Hawthorne and the Real (Bell 2005), a collection of essays celebrating the bicentennial of the author’s birth. This collection includes such topics as politics, race, transnationality, feminism, and masculinity. In the spirit of the current critical project, Brenda Wineapple aptly refers to Hawthorne as an “incipient post modernist” (“Nathaniel Hawthorne” 195). However, in terms of Hawthorne’s “Custom House” definition of romance fiction existing in a “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land,” (Scarlet Letter 36), the current critical conversation places a disproportionate weight on the “real” world at the expense of “fairy-land.” His essay seeks to redress this imbalance by looking again at the significance of “fairy-land” in Hawthorne’s last romance. My purpose is not so much to question current readings of Hawthorne as it is to restore the moral complexity and the lost sense of the miraculous provided by the presence of fairy tales in The Marble Faun. That is, I would argue that to examine the “real” in Hawthorne, one must take account of the ambiguous mix of facts and imagination that is always at the heart of his fiction. In fact, Hawthorne might have agreed with Jack Zipes’s description of fairy tales as vehicles to “awaken our regard for the miraculous condition of life and to evoke profound feelings of awe and respect for life as a miraculous process” (Great Fairy Tale Tradition 848). (2) I Since Hawthorne himself described his romances as “having a great deal more to do with the clouds overhead, than with any portion of the actual soil” (“Preface,” House of the Seven Gables 3), we can hardly assume these clouds are merely eccentric stylistic flourishes and expect to account fully for the author’s purposes. The comments in the Preface to Mosses from an Old Manse that the tales seem to have been written “of a single summer” because “in fairy-land, there is no measurement of time” (33). Thus, Hawthorne also reads his own life in such fantastic terms. As a writer Hawthorne also describes himself in fairy tale terms, possibly alluding to Sleeping Beauty as he describes himself: “I sat down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity.” He is then saved by his encouraging college friend, Horatio Bridge: “And there, perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment, with the moss on the imprisoning tree-trunks, and the yellow leaves of more than a score of autumns piled above me, if it had not been for you” (“Preface” to The Snow Image 1155). Looking back on his boyhood, Hawthorne stated that “my native propensities were towards Fairy Land” (Miller 49). The found much of his source material in Bunyan, Shakespeare, Spenser, The Arabian Nights, and mythology–which he then moralized through his interest in Milton and his own Puritan leanings.a

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