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Nathaniel Hawthorne spent 7 years abroad, most of which was spent in England and Italy. The end of his last major novel, written with his ‘abroad-ness’ fully in view, is The Marble Faun (1860), a novel that concerns the nature of art, representation, and a fall from grace, all within a prose which delights in the ambiguities inherent in life and art. (Coincidentally, if you’ve only read The Scarlet Letter, give this book a shot for a totally different Hawthorne). On the last several pages, the narrator makes his presence known while telling the story of two American expats who return home. I think it is an apt, although certainly melancholy, understanding of the phenomena of being ‘transatlantic’:

‘And, now that life had so much human promise in it, they resolved to go back to their own land; because the years, after all, have a kind of emptiness, when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment, when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by-and-by, there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries, we have none at all, or only that little space of either, in which we finally lay down our discontented bones. It is wise, therefore, to come back betimes—or never’ (357-8).

This entry was posted by Ashley on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 5:56 pm. This entry was tagged with Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.