Opening Paragraph
The opening paragraph of Chapter One of the novel is little more than imagery, really. It is imagery serving a much broader purpose than mere stage-setting. Within the opening images of this opening to a chapter subtitled after the names of the four main characters can be found—within reason, of course—the entirety of the narrative foreshadowed. Unfortunately for resistant readers, one must engage the entirety of the narrative to figure this out:
“Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room...in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries.”
All Gothic-y and Stuff
To be clear, this is not a gothic horror novel. Nevertheless, Hawthorne is a gothic writer even when not necessarily trying. Passages like the following are abundant evidence that at times in this work of fiction, he was determinedly trying to instill an appropriately gothic atmosphere. And no literary technique fulfils that role quite like imagery:
“The figure of their friend was now discernible by her own torchlight, approaching out of one of the cavernous passages. Miriam came forward, but not with the eagerness and tremulous joy of a fearful girl, just rescued from a labyrinth of gloomy mystery. She made no immediate response to their inquiries and tumultuous congratulations; and, as they afterwards remembered, there was something absorbed, thoughtful, and self-concentrated in her deportment. She looked pale, as well she might, and held her torch with a nervous grasp, the tremor of which was seen in the irregular twinkling of the flame.”
The Faun of Marble
Take the chance of titling your novel after a work of sculpture and you had better be prepared to put imagery to the test to stimulate and maintain the interest of the reader. Be prepared for extensive verbiage devoted to the statue, but the first remains the best and the most significant:
“The Faun is the marble image of a young man, leaning his right arm on the trunk or stump of a tree; one hand hangs carelessly by his side; in the other he holds the fragment of a pipe, or some such sylvan instrument of music. His only garment–a lion’s skin, with the claws upon his shoulder–falls halfway down his back, leaving the limbs and entire front of the figure nude.”
Rome
Hawthorne extends well beyond the New England setting with which he is most associated with this venture into continental fiction. Rome is situated in such a place of important as almost to become the novel’s sixth major character—after the four humans and the titular statue. Extensive use of imagery often has this effect upon place:
“The courtyard and staircase of a palace built three hundred years ago are a peculiar feature of modern Rome, and interest the stranger more than many things of which he has heard loftier descriptions. You pass through the grand breadth and height of a squalid entrance-way, and perhaps see a range of dusky pillars, forming a sort of cloister round the court, and in the intervals, from pillar to pillar, are strewn fragments of antique statues, headless and legless torsos, and busts that have invariably lost what it might be well if living men could lay aside in that unfragrant atmosphere–the nose.”
