Misfits and Marble Fauns: Religion and Romance in Hawthorne & O'Connor

O'Connor also attacks the idea that mind will always triumph over matter, that the world is ours to examine and play with, and that everything can all too easily be reduced to solvable problems by secular reformers, obsessed idealists, brutally logical Calvinists, mad scientists, and liberal humanists. O'Connor saw her work as part of the Hawthornian tradition of romance, and from this perspective, Piper structures her book with such early chapters as "Outside Observers: Hawthorne's Artists and Idealists" and "Romance as Bildung: Self-Transformation in The Marble Faun" and later chapters such as "O'Connor as 'Realist of Distances': Romance, Prophecy, and the Modern Mind" and "The Hubris of the Sacred Self: Mystery, Tragedy, and the Christian Vision." Piper connects O'Connor's Catholic vision of sacramental nature and Hawthorne's distrust of scientific or dualistic thinking to their creation of the romance form, which exists to blur the distinctions between subject and object and, in attempting to undermine the many forms that rationalism can take, sets up a series of encounters that reveals the limitations of the human, suggests the ultimate mystery of the world and human consciousness, and often leads to tragic revelations. Piper argues that O'Connor uses violence to shatter the humanist spell, a process she views as having some of its earliest roots in Emerson's transcendentalism: "When Emerson decided, in 1832, that he could no longer celebrate the Lord's Supper unless the bread and wine were removed, an important step in the vaporization of religion in America was taken, and the spirit of that step has continued apace.