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Hawthorne, Madonna, and Lady Gaga: The Marble Faun's Transgressive Miriam

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2012

MICHAEL BROEK
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Abstract

Most criticism of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Novel The Marble Faun has focussed on its many images of domestic containment, its supposed argument in favor of Christian idealism, as well as Hawthorne's apparent “castration” of the American sculptor Kenyon – just another in a long list of the author's male protagonists who succumb to a mixture of self-doubt (Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter), narcissism (Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance), and the allure of the chaste virgin (Holgrave, in The House of the Seven Gables). This essay, however, argues that Miriam, the novel's chief female protagonist, actually completes a complicated “liberation” from the proscriptions (as Hawthorne envisioned them) of her gender, enacted by her embrace of multiple, ancient, and organic symbols. Through a simultaneous analysis of the American music icons Madonna and Lady Gaga, we find that Hawthorne engages a complex set of ideational forces – misogyny, Catholicism, and female eros – as Miriam emerges, like these famous pop stars, as an independent artist, a position that not one of the author's male protagomists is able to attain. In this sense, Miriam may be reconsidered Hawthorne's internationalized Hester, or, more aptly, his mature Pearl.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 625 - 640
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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2 “Alejandro,” dir. Steven Klein, The Fame Monster (Interscope, 2009).

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7 Camille Paglia, “Dr. Paglia,” Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (New York: Vintage, 1994), 247. Though both Madonna and Gaga have been the subject of feminist debates, these debates are not central to this argument as my focus here is on the homologous relationship between Hawthorne's character Miriam and these two pop artists. The term “transgressive” is used here in the sense of border-crossing and is not necessarily evaluative of Madonna's or Gaga's relationship to feminism.

8 As Hawthorne biographer Brenda Wineapple notes, Una “served as the model for Pearl.” Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2003), 4.

9 Nina Baym, “Revisiting Hawthorne's Feminism,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings, ed. Leland S. Person, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2005), 557.

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11 Ibid., 65.

12 Ibid., 115.

13 Ibid., 62.

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17 I mean here to refer to those readings, such as Bercovitch's, that render Hawthorne's works as allegories of domestic, and hence political, containment.

18 Obviously, it is no surprise that violence and female sexuality are bound up in early American literature, as in Native American captivity narratives or the leatherstocking novels of Cooper, but these representations are particularly Protestant. The additional consideration that I am suggesting here is the Catholic iconography, which Hawthorne first encountered in a sustained way during his travels in Italy (1858–59) following his four-year stint as the US consul in Liverpool.

19 John Seabrook, “Transformer” New Yorker Online, 1 Feb. 2010.

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21 Though Hilda has artistic skill, she is rendered a “copyist.”

22 This may be an unusual reading of Hepzibah, but she is the only character in the novel who has to come to terms with her “fallen” state and assume a new course of life, this time as the proprietor of a cent-shop. She is Phoebe's antipode.

23 Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life, 176.

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39 Ibid., 286.

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42 Ibid., 143.

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44 Ibid., 144.

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46 Interview with Forrest Sawyer, Nightline, 3 Dec. 1990.

47 I understand that feminist critics might consider this statement highly arguable. See note 7 above.

48 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 149.

49 Ibid., 101.

50 Ibid., 308.

51 Ibid., 332.

52 Ibid., 336.

53 Ibid., 20.

54 Ibid., 44.

55 Ibid., 354.

56 Ibid., 355.

57 Ibid., 354.

58 Ibid., 288.

59 Ibid., 288.

60 Not including the Postscript, which was added by Hawthorne to the second edition at the behest of a confused reading public.

61 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 358, emphasis added.

62 Ibid., 358.

63 Ibid., 99.

64 Brodtkorb, “Art Allegory in The Marble Faun,” 255.

65 Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 7.

66 Traisnel, Antoine, “The Temptation of Kitsch: The Fall of Hawthorne,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 34, 1–2 (Spring–Fall 2008), 65Google Scholar.

67 Ibid., 77.

68 McElroy, “One for the Pope,” E2.

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70 Milder, Robert, “Beautiful Illusions: Hawthorne and the Site of Moral Law,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, 33, 2 (Fall 2007), 10Google Scholar.

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