Deanna Fernie's book is aptly named: while its immediate subject is Nathaniel Hawthorne's use of sculpture as an analog for his own writing, it also explores a number of provocative questions about the role of American art in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Her analysis of Hawthorne's use of sculpture is itself multifaceted, looking at a variety of his works to show how he presents this art as both more limited and at times more capacious than the more inchoate art of storytelling. At the same time, she extends her analysis to raise questions about other aesthetic forms, such as the fragment, the outline, the sketch, and the ruin, as well as about painting and portraiture. While at times the sheer number of issues that Fernie raises obscure her central arguments, her book gives a magisterial account “of what sculpture is doing in Hawthorne's work as a whole,” as she puts it (19), as well as an illuminating discussion of the philosophical, theoretical, and historical underpinnings that inform our understanding of this relation.

Hawthorne's most extended account of sculpture occurs in The Marble Faun, and for this reason it is no surprise that the study's final chapter presents a nuanced reading of this work, with a particular focus on the incomplete bust of Donatello and its implications for the unfinished nature of Hawthorne's romance. Fernie also devotes a chapter-long case study to “Drowne's Wooden Image,” a tale that is likewise most obviously concerned with sculpture. At the same time, she finds sculptural allusions and metaphors in a number of other works, including not only The Scarlet Letter but also lesser-studied sketches such as “A Select Party,” “Chippings of a Chisel,” “The Great Stone Face,” and “Footprints on the Seashore.” Her readings of these sketches remind us why they should be studied more often; she shows that they frame important questions about Hawthorne's conceptions of artistic agency and reception as well as about the relative merits of the miniature and fleeting as opposed to the monumental and prophetic. Similarly, Fernie's readings of better-known works reveal some intriguing tensions. Her analysis of The Scarlet Letter's “Another View of Hester,” for example, shows how Hawthorne uses sculptural imagery to slow down the narrative through an ekphrastic moment that explores interior as well as exterior points of view. The Marble Faun, in contrast, emphasizes the relative weakness of the written word in capturing the reality of representation. In it, Hawthorne employs what Fernie calls a “risky strategy” to show that the “pasts” and “inner thoughts” of characters can never be fully known, and in this sense are like sculptures – which at the same time have the advantage of having an “objectifying power” (214, 216).

The historical context that Fernie brings to bear on such moments of artistic self-reflexivity includes theories of art and imagination by Schlegel, Lessing, Coleridge, and Emerson, as well as a number of actual sculptures and paintings, reproductions of many of which she includes in the book. For example, she interestingly compares Thomas Eakins's William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River to Hawthorne's vision of the artisan Drowne in his carving studio, and, by extension, to Hawthorne in his study. She is not particularly concerned with the biographical or publishing context that informs Hawthorne's self-reflexivity, as many other scholars have been, preferring to focus on what she calls, borrowing another sculptural metaphor, the “chisel marks” that Hawthorne leaves behind in his published works (242).

Her emphasis on aesthetics and representation also informs her understanding of what she terms “the larger question of America's status as a new nation still in the process of being formed” (13) and the role of art in articulating that political process. Although she examines a number of European and British contexts, her primary argument is an exceptionalist one, looking at the problem of originality and distinctiveness for Hawthorne and his contemporaries and how “the double trajectory of fragment and project, as two sides of the same coin, symbolizes the problem” they faced (111). She examines this context by looking at how some mid-century American writers and artists viewed themselves in relation to their European predecessors, particularly the iconic figure of Michelangelo. This part of her argument is most successful when it helps illuminate the philosophical framework that Hawthorne's work both advances and reflects: a framework that looks at central tensions between, for example, process and product, material medium and immaterial interpretation, exterior surface and interior mind, and ideal form and real imperfection. She is particularly perceptive when describing how ruins functioned as both vestiges of a fading culture and opportunities for building a new one. Her approach is less successful, however, when she turns to the politics of race and slavery. At various points in the book, she touches on this subject only then to sidestep it. “The racial implications of color notwithstanding, ‘Drowne's Wooden Image’ focuses on the artist in America, including the literary artist,” she writes, for example, turning then to a compelling argument about the masthead's status between American folk art and the higher art associated with European marble (156). At the same time, her identification of some of these racialized images points to some productive future directions in Hawthorne studies.

Overall, this engrossing book provides richly detailed readings of many of Hawthorne's works while opening up important questions about his goals as an author and artist. At a time when some literary critics are turning to cognitive science for an understanding of “the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking,” as Coleridge puts it (quoted at 171), Fernie shows how an author's self-reflexive attention to the interaction between art and writing can speak to this same topic while also inviting readers to understand “the necessity of perplexity as a full response to the tangled density of human moral life” (252).