ABSTRACT
In addition to sharing Shakespearean precedent as a common source for the Romantic moral romance sub-genre, Elizabeth Inchbald and Nathaniel Hawthorne both drew on the conventions of religious belief and socially driven religious practice as they experimented with their alternative form of fiction. Incorporating elements of legends and fables, the form blended allegorical potential and symbolic meaning in a way that, while it examined character motivation in psychological terms, questioned established conventions of moral order and, in some cases, proposed alternatives to that order. Inchbald’s Nature and Art and Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun are particularly relevant to the examination of religious concerns since they directly engage the traditions of Anglicanism, Catholicism and Puritanism as defining elements of prevailing cultural identity. In particular, Nature and Art and The Marble Faun examine the response of religious tradition to sin and guilt at the individual and social levels to suggest that the religious response often fails to provide adequate solutions to the harsh reality of the individual’s experience. Again, however, the two authors did not treat their subjects in an identical manner. As a Catholic, Inchbald was concerned with the influence of Anglicanism on her characters’ lives in England, while Hawthorne chose to examine Puritanism and Catholicism as the two religious traditions operated in the lives of his characters in Rome. Despite the divergence, however, both authors treat the subject of religion similarly by incorporating its multi-faceted socio-cultural influence into their texts in ways that challenge traditional assumptions while suggesting alternatives to the established moral order.
