Roman Holidays: American Writers and Artists in Nineteenth-Century Italy (review)

If, as the familiar saying goes, all roads lead to Rome, then it appears that the roads taken by nineteenth-century American writers and artists often led them through Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. At least, such is the initial impression one gets upon looking into this illuminating critical collection. Fully seven of the twelve essays in Roman Holidays concern themselves directly with the production and/or reception of Hawthorne's 1860 romance, while four of the remaining five also cite the novel at least once (the lone exception is Robert Milder's examination of Herman Melville's 1856-1857 visit to the Mediterranean region, which mentions Hawthorne only as a fellow traveler in Italy). Taking their cue from a comment Henry James makes in his 1879 book on Hawthorne, Robert Martin and Leland Person observe in their introduction that Hawthorne's last completed work of fiction "served as a guidebook for travelers [to Rome], who went to see the sites of the novel, and illustrated editions provided reproductions of paintings and sculptures" that were to be described and adapted yet again in subsequent works of art (2). However, this initial identification of The Marble Faun as the "pretextual presence" (3) of many post-1860 works by Americans in and about Italy quickly leads to a much broader analysis of the reception, appropriation, and representation of a specific place in the history of American literature and art. Roman Holidays amply demonstrates that Americans' "cultural interpretation or reading" (3) of Italy in the nineteenth century repeatedly came back not only to the history of aesthetics and form but, more pointedly, to questions of nationality, race, and gender.

The book's title figure of a "roman holiday" signifies a moment in which a traveler to Italy, be it Goethe or Audrey Hepburn, throws off the shackles of restricted behavior in order to question and then reaffirm or, as the case may be, reject notions of both propriety and identity. Employed as an organizing principle, this figure highlights the ways in which the idea of Italy, not to mention the place itself, enabled "nineteenth-century American writers and artists [. . .] to work out 'local' issues on 'foreign' ground even as they sought 'holidays' from such issues" (8). The arrangement of essays is not strictly chronological; Milder's work on Melville, for instance, follows not only the opening chapters on The Marble Faun but also discussions of Margaret Fuller, James, and W. D. Howells. This arrangement provides for a series of arguments that quite effectively develop the book's overall concerns. Beginning with Richard H. Millington's "Where is Hawthorne's Rome?," which looks closely at Hawthorne's concerns with being an American of leisure in Italy, the book eventually ends up at Robert S. Levine's "Road to Africa," in which Frederick Douglass's writings about being an American in Italy are investigated for Douglass's attempt to frame himself as the quintessential American traveler. Along the way, essays by Robert K. Martin on Hawthorne, Priscilla L. Walton on James, and Brigitte Bailey on Fuller and Hawthorne each explicate different aspects of the extent to which tourism—and tourist sensibilities—were founded upon racialized definitions of nationality and identity.

In the middle of the book are a series of essays focused on James's extensive contributions to this field of "roman holiday" literature. Essays by John Carlos Rowe and Leland Person both consider Hawthorne's and James's engagements with the sculpture of fellow Americans Harriet Hosmer and William Wetmore Story. Rowe's arguments about the representation of desire in James's response to Hawthorne and in William Wetmore Story and His Friends nicely complicate certain prevailing assumptions about the nature of desire in James's day. More compellingly, Person argues that The Marble Faun and Roderick Hudson...