The Search for Legitimacy in Nathaniel Parker Willis’s Paul Fane

Abstract

In 1856, the New England poet, editor, and travel writer Nathaniel Parker Willis published Paul Fane; or, Parts of a Life Else Untold, a slightly autobiographical romance about the adventures of an American artist in Florence. Willis hoped that his first and, as it turned out, only novel would be a success, but neither in his own time nor thereafter has the book enjoyed much appreciation; in fact, it has been almost forgotten. This is quite unfortunate because Willis’s text significantly departs from the many other international novels of the nineteenth century. Most are decidedly pro-American tracts, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s somewhat moralistic The Marble Faun (1860) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-Catholic Agnes of Sorrento (1962); some, like Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869) and William Dean Howells’s A Foregone Conclusion (1875), strike a more tolerant and sympathetic note about the Old World; and Henry James’s works often tip the value scales toward European societies. Paul Fane follows a different trajectory because the narrative’s ambiguity and inconclusiveness call into question the very search for legitimacy—of self and country—and thus undermine the nationalistic ambitions of transatlantic fiction.