The Marble Faun

In addition to taking a full course load, working on the research portion of my thesis and preparing PhD applications, I am also five weeks away from taking the comprehensive exams. The six-hour exam that culminates the master's program...and yet, is scheduled right in the middle of the two-year program. Anyway, they have reformatted the exam this year, and on October 29th, I will be one of the guinea pigs taking this new format.

This weekend I finished Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, which is on the comps reading list. At its heart, it is about the transformation from innocence to experience. Yet it manages to do so without being didactic.  It explores the complicated dynamics of love, innocence, knowledge and desire setting the scene in Italy, which balances the deep interpersonal questions with meditations on art, travel, the beauty of Rome, and the Italian countryside. There is a lot more in the novel too about religion, for example, but those were some of the things that intrigued me most.

It's most interesting aspect, in my opinion, is the steady concentration on what it is that makes us human and how that can and cannot be communicated through the arts. It is a great novel, and I highly recommend reading it! Maybe it's because I'm returning to his work more than 10 years after reading The Scarlet Letter, but I enjoyed this way more than that book. It is also the kind of novel that we don't really find being published anymore.

If you do decide to read it, let me know. I'm dying to talk more about it!