The Embodiment of the Daughter's Secret in The Marble Faun

STACEY VALLAS The Embodiment of the Daughter's Secret in The Marble Faun Silence itself—the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers—is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies. —Foucault: The History of Sexuality Yet, how can we imagine that a stain of ensanguined crime should attach to Miriam! Or how, on the other hand, should spotless innocence be subjected to a thralldom like that which she endured from the spectre, whom she herself had evoked out of the darkness! —Hawthorne: The Marble Faun s Hawthorne criticism attests, nothing incites discourse . like a secret. The pursuit of an unspeakable mystery at the heart of identity and of community—a mystery whose source lies in the difficulty of distinguishing sorrow or misfortune from moral failure—is central to much ofHawthorne's fiction. His work also illustrates a tendency within American Romanticism to call attention to how the body and representations of the human form, such as sculpture and portraiture, bear the signs of what cannot be directly spoken. The Scarlet Letter is perhaps the most striking dramatization ofthis tendency: Hester Prynne literally bears the mark of the unspeakable, of her never-named crime in the form of the letter ?" which is in many ways the novel's central character. Arizona Quarterl·? Volume 46 Number 4, Winter 1990 Copyright © 1990 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1610 74Stacey Vallas Hawthorne's last published novel, The Marbie Faun, or The Romance of Monte Beni (i860), which concerns transformative encounters among artists and objets d'art in Rome, explicitly explores the relationship between representation and secrets—both the representation of secrets and the secrets ofrepresentation. I would like to use Hawthorne's early tale "The Minister's Black Veil" as a point of departure in my discussion of how The Marble Faun embodies the unspeakable in ways that both express and suppress the novel's secrets, specifically the role that father-daughter incest and the silences surrounding it play in the coercive modeling and framing of feminity within patriarchal culture. Hawthorne published "The Minister's Black Veil" in the eleventh year of what he would look back on as a twelve-year period of seclusion in his Salem family home following his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825. He composed it in his attic bedroom, which, he would later write, "deserves to be called a haunted chamber,"1 in a house in which he often could go days without conversing with or even seeing his fellow inhabitants, his mother and his two sisters. The tale is remarkable not only because of the peculiar circumstances in which it was composed nor only in the sense that it is an impressive work of fiction, but also because its themes and structure—its veils—are re-marked in such a seemingly indelible fashion upon the corpus of Hawthorne's fiction . Here many of the central preoccupations ofThe Marble Faun-the links between identity, representation, and secrets resulting in "an ambiguity of sin or sorrow" which overshadows the text we read as well as its protagonist—are pared down to the form of a parable.2 This tale can serve as a trope for Hawthorne's later novel which obstinately refuses to disclose the secrets precipitating its baroque and rather clumsy plot. In contrast, the plot of "The Minister's Black Veil," like the central act of which it consists, is deceptively straightforward. Mr. Hooper, the parson of a New England village—a kind, gentle, reserved, melancholy man of about thirty—astonishes his congregation when he arrives at the meeting house one Sunday wearing a black veil consisting of "two folds of crape" (873) over his face. He greets his parishioners and proceeds to deliver a sermon as if nothing is amiss. However, this sermon, though "marked by the same characteristics of style and manners , as the general series of his pulpit oratory," is rendered singularly powerful. Hawthorne leaves the source of this...