Students in my class, young and pretty, look definitely like Hilda, the spotless dove-like white heroine in The Marble Faun. Many of them, however, detest this frail passive New England girl and prefer Miriam, the enigmatic dark heroine. They don't like the plot that the saintly dove on the Virgin's Tower ended up as the "household saint" in Kenyon's and her fireside back in New England. They say, "She never learned anything even after spending precious time overseas." The last presenter concluded that Miriam and Donatello were the couple in pursuit of truth, whereas Hilda and Kenyon were just realistic and conventional. She said the latter two never got into the domain of truth because Hilda did not admit or never committed "sin" and prevented Kenyon to think deep. If American "innocence" was one of the themes of the text, this innocence, in fact, could mean "ignorance." Two New Englanders went back to America to start a "home" leaving their artistic energies as well as a romantic idealistic pursuite of truth behind in Europe. -- What a fantastic cultural critic Hawthorne was! Was America such a prosaic place without romantic elements in his time? It probably was so at least for Hawtohrne -- it is ironic Hawthorne never was able to regain his artistic energy back to complete another work after he went back to US from Europe.
We 'll read another book on the similar theme, "Americans in Italy," The Portrait of a Lady in the fall semester. James certainly was fascinated with Hawthorne's white heroine (dove). Isabel Archer is a bookish girl and isn't afraid of looking into "blackness" in spite of her dove quality. It will be interesting to see how James develops the white heroine in his novel.
I have a wonderful group of sutdents this year in my seminar.
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