...West. So, too, did Hawthorne when in 1 860 he described the United States as 'a country where there is no ... antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy...commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.' It was not ignorance or insensitivity that led to these wry complaints. It was merely, astonishingly,...

...time he denatello, Count of Monte Beni after whom his novel The Marble Faun was named. In the Preface romance about a country where there is no shadow....no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy clared: "/ like my present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence, and...

...Hawthorne had ironically bemoaned the situation in America where No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily handled themes,...

...novels and to lay the scene of them in the western world. "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...as is happily the case with my dear native land." The perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat...

...Hawthorne had ironically bemoaned the situation in America where No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily handled themes,...

...problem of Gables. In the preface to Faun, Hawthorne writes: No author, without a trial, can conceive ol the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes,...

...attitude toward the past, for in the preface to his last novel, The Marble Faun ( \ 860), he speaks of the "difficulty of writing a romance about a country...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land."27 The Marble Faun is set in Italy, with a dark heroine, Miriam, who has a mysterious and sin-laden...

...insisted upon, äs they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country...common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, äs is happily the case with my dear native land [...] Romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers,...

...insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country...where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery. 12 Not only is it the case that James criticizes Hawthorne for doing precisely what the earlier author...

...1 But in the preface to The Marble Faun, the Italian setting is justified as an alternative to the country "where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy evil."174 And the ambivalence of the images of Rome is tantamount to the contaminations which pull...