...trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy...common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land" (preface to The Marble Faun, 3). (The complex meaning...

...Nathaniel Hawthorne's complaint that one cannot create enduring art in "a country where there is no shadow, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything...but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight."29 This image of a crude and simple society, a culture whose most prominent feature is that...