Language:
English
Year of publication:
2001
Titel der Quelle:
Studies in the Novel
Angaben zur Quelle:
33,4 (2001) 430-443
Keywords:
Hawthorne, Nathaniel,
;
Christian converts from Judaism
;
Christian converts from Judaism
Abstract:
Examines Hawthorne's romance "The Marble Faun" (1858), which is set in Rome, against the background of the Mortara affair in Italy that same year, when the Catholic Church succeeded in retaining a Jewish child who was abducted from his parents and clandestinely baptized. Suggests that, in the novel, Rome symbolizes the tyrannical power of the papacy, and that Miriam is a crypto-Jew who is struggling against this tyranny. Hawthorne evinces a Protestant hatred of Catholicism while maintaining an ambivalence about Jews. In "The Marble Faun", an American Protestant woman is threatened with forced conversion, while the Italian crypto-Jew, Miriam, symbolizes sexual power and danger, thus being a victimizer as well as a victim. Notes that in 1859 a secular Italian state was poised to limit the power of the papacy, a development which apparently suited Hawthorne, with his greater antipathy to Roman Catholicism than sympathy with the fate of Jewish victims of the Church.
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