ヒルダとは何者か : 人種と宗教から見た The Marble Faun 論

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It was one year before the Civil War (1861-65) that Nathaniel Hawthorne's last completed novel, The Marble Faun, was published. In those days America was troubled mainly with two issues : the invasion of Catholicism following the huge influx of Irish immigrants, and the abolition of slavery. They put many WASP Americans into a psychologically unstable state. The Marble Faun, however, has so far been read as a work in which Hawthorne deliberately avoids describing contemporary delicate matters. In this article, assuming The Marble Faun as a work which does deal with the religious and racial issues facing antebellum America, I pay special atttention to Hilda as a WASP of the antebellum era. She suggests how vulnerable WASP identity was to the influence of religious and racial "Others." Although this "daughter of the Puritans" was strongly attracted to Catholic faith in Italy, finding that "it applies itself to all the demands of human infirmity, " Hilda succeeds in preserving her religious identity by denying it in the end. As well, the racial identity of this American woman is threatened by the racially impure Miriam and her lover/accomplice Donatello. They can be regarded as "Africanists" (in Toni Morrison's term) through the association of Miriam with the figure of the southern mullatta and Donatello with the politics of primitivism. Hilda cannot accept them because they threaten to stain her "whiteness" as a WASP. In this way, we may say that the seemingly happy ending of The Marble Faun is really an "ominous" one for America because Hilda, a WASP, has rejected the "Africanists" m order to preserve her own racial identity. Kenyon, who can be considered as Hawthorne's alter ego, repeatedly gives relatively objective comments about Hilda, which disclose Hawthorne's own obsession about WASP-ness, his sense of guilt for it, and his uneasiness about America's approaching future.
2005-03-31

ヒルダとは何者か : 人種と宗教から見た The Marble Faun 論

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