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But this "better model of womanhood" commits suicide for
want of love, while the obstreperous Hollingsworth is collared by
Prissy and dragged to the altar. The puritan morality of predes·
tination takes its toll as the story closes. Humanity is divided into
the damned and the saved, irretrievably so, a11d never the twain
shall meet. Yet the
Romance,
despite its mechanically enforced
moral lessons, stands out among Hawthorne's works for its out·
spokenness and for its bold and free characterization of Coverdale
and Zenobia. In its painful doubleness, in its feeling of combined
attraction and repulsion, the relationship between these two char·
acters is one of the most meaningful and seminal in American
literature. It is intrinsically the relationship between New England
and the world, and again the connection with James comes to
mind. Zenobia can be understood as an earlier and cruder version
of Madame de Vionnet (of
The Ambassadors),
whose worldly
motives and passionate nature Lambert Strether finally comes to
understand and to accept; and Coverdale, too, is reproduced
in
James, and not in one type alone. One recognizes his kinship with
Strether, who has overcome the obsession with sin and is priming
himself to enter forbidden territory, no less than with such a
curious figure as the spying, eavesdropping protagonist of
The
Sacred Fount,
whose neurotic fear and envy of life find an outlet
in a mania of snooping and prying into the lives of his neighbors.
In this nameless Jamesian snooper the 'peephole' motif reaches its
culmination: it has become his medium of existence and his intel·
lectual rationale besides.
In
The Marble Faun
Hawthorne resumes his story of the dark
lady, and his attitude to her is now formulated in more logical
terms. The conception of sin as an "instrument most effective
in
the education of intellect and soul" is openly expounded and
affirmed by Miriam, whereas the snow-maiden Hilda, who is a
purist and perfectionist, defends to the last the old puritan ethic.
What Miriam advocates is the right of the personality to that self–
knowledge and self-development which only the process of expe–
ri.ence can provide. But she too, like Hester, is in the end sentenced
by the author to life-long suffering and expiation of her sin. Unlike
Hester's sin, however, Miriam's is utterly chimerical, fabricated
out of the whole cloth by the Gothic machinery of horror; what
alone is real is her defiance of the ancestral taboos.
