The Marble Faun (1860), Nathaniel Hawthorne's final completed novel, is set in Rome and follows three young American artists—Hilda, Kenyon, and the mysterious Miriam—along with Donatello, an Italian count bearing an uncanny resemblance to Praxiteles' marble faun. When Donatello murders Miriam's shadowy persecutor by hurling him from the Tarpeian Rock, the act shatters his Edenic innocence. The novel traces how sin, guilt, and suffering paradoxically deepen the characters' moral and spiritual consciousness. Blending Gothic mystery, art criticism, and allegory, Hawthorne meditates on the fall of man, the transformation wrought by transgression, and the possibility of redemption through experience.
