Miriam’s Red Jewel: Jewish Femininity and Cultural Memory in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun

Abstract

This article offers a new perspective on Miriam’s red jewel in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), interpreting it as a symbol of Jewish femininity, diasporic memory, and aesthetic resistance. Although the jewel has received little critical attention, this study suggests that it plays a central role in shaping Miriam’s identity and in articulating broader cultural anxieties around gender, ethnicity, and visibility. Through intertextual readings of Shakespeare’s Jessica and Walter Scott’s Rebecca and Rowena, the essay situates Miriam within a literary tradition of Jewish women whose identities are mediated through symbolic adornments. In addition to literary analysis, the article draws on visual art history—particularly Carol Ockman’s interpretation of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1848 portrait of Baronne de Rothschild—to explore how 19th-century visual culture contributed to the eroticization and exoticization of Jewish women. By placing Hawthorne’s portrayal of Miriam in dialogue with such visual representations, the essay highlights how the red jewel functions as a site of encoded cultural meaning. The analysis is further informed by feminist art theory (Griselda Pollock) and postcolonial critique (Edward Said), offering an interdisciplinary approach to questions of identity, marginalization, and symbolic resistance. While not claiming to offer a definitive reading, this article aims to open new interpretive possibilities by foregrounding the jewel’s narrative and symbolic significance. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing conversations in Hawthorne studies, Jewish cultural history, and the intersections of literature and visual art.

1. Introduction: Inheriting the Jewel

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Jewish female protagonist, Miriam, stands as a singular and striking figure in mid-nineteenth-century American literature. As one of the four central characters in The Marble Faun (1860)—Hawthorne’s final completed romance—Miriam is notable not only for her implied Jewish identity but also for her position as a female artist, an anomaly both in Hawthorne’s oeuvre and in the broader literary landscape of the period. Alongside Hester Prynne, the seamstress-artist of The Scarlet Letter, Miriam is one of the rare women in Hawthorne’s fiction who actively produce symbolic meaning. Her art is not simply an embellishment of the narrative but a central vehicle for exploring themes of sin, memory, gender, and moral complexity.

Miriam’s paintings, which frequently depict biblical heroines such as Judith and Jael, are particularly subversive. These figures—righteous and violent—undermine traditional patriarchal narratives by acting decisively and outside conventional gender norms. Through her portrayal, Hawthorne reframes Jewish women not as passive victims, but as empowered agents of justice and transformation. Her art, therefore, serves as both a feminist and aesthetic challenge to dominant cultural narratives.

Critic Nina Baym has argued that Miriam’s artwork is driven primarily by trauma and reaction, suggesting that the murder of the Model, her persecutor, liberates her from this oppressive influence. Baym writes that Miriam’s art is “saved from this throttling hatred” and characterizes her creative vision as an expression of “a perverted Eros” born of fear and defiance” (Baym 1971, p. 361). However, these readings risk reducing Miriam’s artistry to a symptom of psychological damage or defensive resistance. While her past undoubtedly informs her creative work, it does not define or constrain it. The nature of Miriam’s art is not necessarily reactive; it arises from a complex imaginative and ethical vision that challenges inherited myths and reclaims suppressed histories. Griselda Pollock, on the other hand, re-examines canonical male artists such as Degas and Rossetti through a feminist lens, and crucially reinserts women artists (e.g., Morisot, Cassatt) into art history to challenge the masculine gaze. She critiques how women have traditionally been defined as “the beautiful image for the desiring male gaze” (Pollock 1988, p. 23), and hence excluded from creative authority. Miriam, rather than being passively viewed, asserts imaginative and creative agency through both her art and her symbolic red jewel, actively resisting objectification. Moreover, Cherry and Pollock, in their psychoanalytic feminist critique, explore how femininity has historically been constructed as passive or secondary—a mere foil to masculine creativity. In her analysis of the “female sign,” exemplified by figures like Elizabeth Siddall, Pollock demonstrates how women have been positioned as aesthetic objects rather than artistic subjects (Cherry and Pollock 1984, p. 218). This framework is particularly relevant to Miriam’s characterization. Her red jewel is not a passive ornament but a “signified object”—a site of encoded trauma, memory, and creative power. It echoes Pollock’s and Cherry’s framing of feminine symbols as contested spaces of meaning, where personal and cultural histories converge. Attending to the jewel allows us to move beyond readings of Miriam as merely exoticized or marginal, demonstrating instead how Hawthorne engages more deeply with questions of Jewish identity, cultural memory, and symbolic resistance.

Judith Fryer observes that Miriam “is both a vehicle of guilt and a vessel of redemption” (Fryer 1976, p. 66)—a duality that finds one of its most potent expressions in the symbol of her red jewel. More than a mere ornament, the jewel evokes biblical imagery while linking Miriam to a broader artistic and literary lineage of Jewish women who embody both spiritual depth and cultural transgression. This complex interplay between allure and danger, redemption and stigma, is not confined to Hawthorne’s literary imagination; it also manifests in the visual culture of the 19th century, particularly in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s 1848 portrait of Baronne de Rothschild. Ingres’s sensualized 1848 portrait of Baronne de Rothschild—Betty (Betsabée) de Rothschild, the daughter of Austrian Jewish banker Salomon de Rothschild and wife of James de Rothschild, founder of the French branch of the dynasty—illustrates the way 19th-century Jewish women were visually constructed through intersecting layers of eroticism, exoticism, and ethnic otherness. During the 1840s and 1850s, anti-Semitic rhetoric circulated widely in France, fueled by aristocratic elites, segments of the Catholic Church, and even liberal commentators. James de Rothschild was frequently accused of manipulating the French stock exchange and steering national politics. Although Betty herself was less directly targeted, her representation in visual culture, particularly through Ingres’s portrait, reveals the extent to which Jewish femininity became a screen for projecting cultural anxieties.

The portrait, as Carol Ockman observes, foregrounds the Baronne de Rothschild’s “lascivious eroticism,” a characterization that emerges not merely from artistic style but from a broader cultural framework that racialized and eroticized Jewish femininity. Ockman argues that Ingres’s depiction of Rothschild diverges from his portrayals of non-Jewish women by deliberately linking sensuality to ethnic identity. This association, she notes, rendered it socially permissible to emphasize Rothschild’s sexuality precisely because of her Jewishness (Ockman 1991, p. 533). Ingres accentuated the portrait’s sensuality through compositional choices: the Baronne’s relaxed posture, the drapery that contours her body, and the unusually direct quality of her gaze. Contemporary viewers, including L. de Geffroy, judged these features as excessive, interpreting them through an Orientalist framework. The erotic charge, however, was not only a matter of style but of reception: Rothschild’s Jewish identity made such overt sensualization culturally acceptable, even expected, in a way it would not have been for her Catholic counterparts. The painting’s sexual suggestiveness thus emerges at the intersection of artistic detail and a broader readiness to eroticize Jewish femininity. Drawing on L. de Geffroy’s 1848 review, Ockman situates the portrait within a 19th-century visual discourse that cast Jewish women as both alluring and transgressive—figures whose beauty was inseparable from their perceived otherness. This shift, she contends, marked a departure from earlier biblical archetypes of virtue, replacing them with Romanticized images of exotic seduction shaped by Enlightenment skepticism and anti-biblical sentiment (Ockman 1991, p. 525).

This aesthetic and ideological transformation finds a literary analogue in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, where Miriam, though her Jewish identity remains implicit, is rendered through similarly Orientalist tropes. Hawthorne’s description of her jewel as “glimmer[ing] with a clear, red lustre” that reflects “all that was passionate and glowing in her native disposition” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 396) echoes the visual language used to frame Rothschild. The jewel, like the Baronne’s adornment, becomes a visual shorthand for sensuality, difference, and cultural ambiguity. It marks Miriam as both captivating and disruptive—an embodiment of the tensions between visibility and exclusion, desire and danger. In this way, Hawthorne’s portrayal does not merely replicate the Orientalist gaze but interrogates it, using the jewel as a symbol of the complex interplay between gender, ethnicity, and narrative power.

Edward Said demonstrates that the real significance of “Orientalism” is to define an “Other” that is to be excluded and dominated.1 The “Oriental,” though often romanticized, is seen as too different from the “Occidental” to merit basic political rights.2 Miriam’s jewel, then, connects her not only to literary predecessors like Jessica in The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare 2006) and Rebecca in Ivanhoe, but to real-world visual representations that marked Jewish femininity as alluring yet threatening.

Scholars such as Sander Gilman (1993), Nina Baym (1971) and Scavan Bercovitch (1988) have explored the representation of Jewish femininity in literature, noting how characters like Miriam are often portrayed through symbols of exoticism and moral ambiguity. What distinguishes Miriam most powerfully is her red jewel—a luminous symbol that recurs throughout the novel and anchors her character within a rich intertextual and cultural tradition. The jewel is interpreted not merely as an accessory but as a metonym for diasporic trauma, female agency, and aesthetic resistance. The jewel glows with an inner fire, echoing the mysterious power and danger of Miriam’s past. The red jewel, in this context, serves as a narrative device that encapsulates Miriam’s resistance to assimilation and patriarchal oppression and her assertion of agency. Furthermore, the jewel’s connection to the seven-branched Jewish candlestick, as described in the novel, underscores its role as a cultural relic3. It is both a personal and communal artifact, linking Miriam to a broader historical and religious tradition. The Etruscan bracelet she gives to Hilda, which echoes the themes of memory, loss, and the transmission of cultural identity, reinforces this symbolism.

Miriam’s imaginative authority resonates deeply with Midrashic traditions, particularly those that emphasize the biblical Miriam’s prophetic voice and her association with a miraculous well that sustained the Israelites in the desert. While Hawthorne never explicitly cites these traditions, their thematic echoes are evident in his construction of Miriam as a character who embodies both spiritual nourishment and subversive force.4 She stands as a paradox: neither wholly redeemed nor irredeemably fallen, neither a passive muse nor a dangerous monster. This duality underscores her refusal to be contained within conventional literary or moral archetypes.

In The Marble Faun—a novel that fuses elements of travel narrative, Gothic romance, and philosophical reflections on guilt and spiritual struggle—Miriam occupies a liminal, unsettling space. She hovers between transgression and compassion, rebellion and redemption. Her Hebrew name evokes the biblical leader who sang her people to safety at the Red Sea, conjuring images of strength, leadership, and sacred song. Simultaneously, her name’s Christian resonance with “Mary” invokes sorrow, grace, and redemptive suffering, suggesting a layered interreligious identity. Her assumed surname, Schaefer, alongside the obscurity of her past and her rejection of neat moral binaries, distances her from Hawthorne’s more allegorically defined figures. Miriam is thus a radical creation: a Jewish woman artist whose voice refuses erasure, assimilation, or silence. Her red jewel—invested by Hawthorne with unresolved symbolic meaning—becomes a potent emblem of buried histories, concealed traumas, and enduring creative power. Through Miriam, Hawthorne intimates a vision of Jewish female identity that resists containment—a haunting, inassimilable presence at the heart of a narrative otherwise drawn toward moral resolution. She is both embedded in and detached from the story’s arc, a spectral figure whose artistry and identity defy closure.

This paper explores how Hawthorne’s portrayal of Miriam—and particularly her red jewel—functions as a layered literary artifact through which questions of Jewish identity, gendered difference, and cultural memory are negotiated. By tracing intertextual connections to earlier representations of Jewish women, such as Shakespeare’s Jessica and Walter Scott’s Rebecca and Rowena, the essay argues that the jewel is not merely a visual marker of Miriam’s “Otherness,” but a symbolic vessel for unresolved cultural tensions and narrative instability. This reading places Miriam within a broader literary and ideological continuum, highlighting how her character reflects, complicates, and sometimes reconfigures 19th-century attitudes toward race, religion, femininity, and the pressures of assimilation.

As Sander Gilman observes, depictions of Jewish women in art and literature often conflate sexualized traits with racialized difference: “the qualities ascribed to sexuality are analogous to those ascribed to race” (Gilman 1993, p. 195). Miriam’s portrayal aligns with this dynamic but also subverts it, recasting her difference as a site of imaginative power. The interpretive framework developed here resonates with contemporaneous Jewish women’s writing, such as Grace Aguilar’s spiritually conflicted heroines in The Vale of Cedars5 and Emma Lazarus’s poetic reflections on Jewish identity and exile. Like Miriam, Aguilar’s and Lazarus’s female figures grapple with the intersecting constraints of gender, religious belonging, and cultural displacement—often through symbolic objects and aesthetic expression.

2. Inherited Jewels: Feminized Objects and the Limits of Assimilation

The portrayal of Jewish women in canonical literature has long vacillated between exotic fascination and moral ambivalence. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Jessica is a paradox: simultaneously daughter and traitor, victim and accomplice. Her decision to steal from her father and convert to Christianity is symbolically punctuated by her exchange of a turquoise ring—a gift from her deceased mother—for a monkey. This act severs not only her ties to Shylock but also her connection to Jewish maternal lineage and memory. Jessica’s jewels, then, are not just trinkets but emblems of betrayal, transformation, and the uneasy transaction between cultural fidelity and assimilation.

Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) offers a more sympathetic, though equally fraught, representation of the Jewish woman in Rebecca. The “bracelet episode” is inspired by the touching “jewel episode” in Ivanhoe. In both novels, the Jewish heroine presents her righteous Christian light-haired counterpart with a wedding gift a jewel during the book’s farewell scene. Miriam offers Hilda a beautiful and expensive Etruscan bracelet; Rebecca gives Rowena a set consisting of a diamond necklace and earrings. “One, the most trifling part of my duty, remains undischarged,” says Rebecca, before parting, “Accept this casket startle not at its contents” (Scott 1820, p. 400). Like Hilda, the pale Christian Rowena is extremely surprised at the beauty of the jewels and the generosity of their giver. Rowena opened the small silver-chased casket, and perceived a carcanet, or necklace, with ear-jewels, of diamonds, which were obviously of immense value. “It is impossible,” she said, tendering back the casket. “I dare not accept a gift of such consequence.” “Yet keep it, lady,” (Scott 1820, p. 400) returned Rebecca. Rebecca continues, saying:

You have power, rank, command, influence; we have wealth, the source both of our strength and of weakness; the value of these toys, ten times multiplied, would not influence half so much as your slightest wish. To you, therefore, the gift is of little value, and to me, what I part with is of much less. Let me not think you deem so wretchedly ill of my nation as your commons believe. Think ye that I prize these sparkling fragments of stone above my liberty? or that my father values them in comparison to the honour of his only child? Accept them, lady—to me they are valueless. I will never wear jewels more.

(Scott 1820, p. 400)

The bracelet is a token of love and friendship, but it is also an indication of the Jewish protagonist’s withdrawal from the novel’s plot and from the world. Like Miriam, whose future is doomed once she is in the hands of the Roman authorities, Rebecca is also condemned to a lonely and miserable life. Interestingly, the reactions of the Christian maidens to the Jewish women’s sacrifice are almost identical. They sympathize with the wretched Jewish women, but they do not offer much solace. Rowena is at least trying to find some kind of a solution to Rebecca’s distress. She first inquiries about a possibility of Rebecca’s conversion to Christianity which would allow the Jewish girl to remain with the Christian friends. Secondly, she suggests that Rebecca enter a Jewish convent, if such is in existence.

The first possibility has obvious colonialist undertones and is perfectly in line with popular British nineteenth-century imperialistic and conversion-promoting discourses. In The Marble Faun, Hilda’s response to Miriam’s kind deed is even less sympathetic. Miriam’s gesture makes Hilda shed some tears: “the bracelet brought the tears into her eyes, as being, in its entire circle, the symbol of as sad a mystery as any that Miriam had attached to the separate gems.” Yet, this short-term sadness is immediately undermined by the novel’s extremely ironic last sentence which shows that no real empathy exists in Hilda’s heart. “But Hilda had a hopeful soul,” says the narrator, “and [Hilda] saw sunlight on the mountain-tops” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 462). Miriam’s sorrow and Rebecca’s sacrifice do not matter. The Christian maiden (Rowena and Hilda) is to be married to her betrothed and live happily ever after, because for her there is “sunlight on the mountain-tops” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 462). The Jewish woman, on the other hand, is destined for torment. Neither Rebecca, nor Miriam, will ever see the Promised Land.

A healer and moral paragon, Rebecca resists romantic closure within the Christian world she inhabits. Her beauty and intelligence invite admiration, but her religious identity makes her integration impossible. In contrast, Rowena, the fair-haired Saxon noblewoman, represents the idealized Christian femininity rewarded with marriage and status. Rebecca’s virtues elevate her, but her Jewishness excludes her from the narrative’s resolution. The contrast between the adorned, silken Rebecca and the modest Rowena underscores the latent ethnonationalism embedded in the text’s gender politics. Together, Rebecca and Miriam construct a literary typology that haunts the representation of Jewish women in 19th-century fiction: the beautiful but problematic outsider whose moral worth may be acknowledged, but whose full inclusion remains elusive. This typology of Jewish heroines resurfaces in Miriam, whose jewel not only recalls earlier literary tokens of identity but also complicates them, carrying new layers of cultural and symbolic weight. Miriam, as rendered by Hawthorne, inherits and reconfigures this typology. Her red jewel connects her to Jessica’s lost ring and Rebecca’s exotic garments—objects that function as a symbol of feminine identity and cultural legacy.

3. From Biblical Blood to Bodily Taboo: The Red Jewel as Embodied History

In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne offers few explicit details about the origin or meaning of Miriam’s red jewel, yet he returns to it with curious insistence. It is described as a “jewel of the Orient,” glowing with an “inner fire,” as if animated by a past it cannot forget. This ambiguity renders the jewel a potent symbol: it is at once decorative and disruptive, beautiful and burdensome. Like the Gothic aesthetic that pervades the novel, the jewel signifies excess, memory, and the uncanny return of the repressed. Miriam’s relationship with the jewel is telling. Unlike Jessica, who carelessly parts with her mother’s ring, or Rebecca, whose finery is a marker of her father’s wealth and her cultural displacement, Miriam clings to her jewel. It is not simply a possession but a kind of inheritance, signaling her as someone who carries an unspoken history. The jewel’s glow mimics the trope of the haunted woman: it radiates the tension between the visible and the concealed, the accepted and the disavowed.”

Moreover, the jewel takes on metaphoric dimensions that resonate with the broader themes of the novel. It echoes the idea of art as both revelation and mask, of history as both illumination and curse. Hawthorne, writing in a period marked by increasing American engagement with questions of race, immigration, and national identity, uses Miriam’s jewel to interrogate the limits of cultural integration. It signals her difference without naming it, inviting speculation but denying resolution. Like the red mark in The Scarlet Letter, the red jewel is a symbol whose potency lies in its inscrutability.

Through the red carbuncle, Hawthorne not only explores Miriam’s guilt but also addresses how society views women’s sexuality: Miriam is condemned for her lost virginity, and her passionate, unruly nature is portrayed as something that must be hidden or suppressed.

Hawthorne’s narrator frequently uses metaphors in which Hilda is portrayed as a “white”, naïve, unspotted young maiden living in “a dove-cote … conversing with the souls of the old masters, feeding … [her] sister doves, and trimming the Virgin’s lamp” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 69), while Miriam is characterized by crimson or blood-stained color. The Model claims: “men have said that this [Miriam’s] white hand had once a crimson stain” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 97). When unsuccessfully trying to reveal her secret to Kenyon, right after the Model’s death, Miriam heavily disappointed by Kenyon’s indifference, (“cold and pitiless … marble”, Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 129), calls her sin “my dark-red carbuncle,” her painful sore and her red blemish. Yet she metaphorically refers to it as her “rich gem” (which is later symbolized by a ruby6 necklace she is wearing while in a carriage) and is not ready to entrust it into Kenyon’s untrustworthy “casket.” “It [Kenyon’s heart] should never be the treasure Place of my secret. It is no precious pearl, as I just now told him; but my dark-red carbuncle—red as blood—is too rich a gem to put into a stranger’s casket” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 130; italics are mine). Kenyon is no longer a friend; he betrayed Miriam’s faith. Miriam’s “dark-red” gem, which symbolizes her sin, calls to mind Hester’s scarlet letter, her sinful badge, “the scarlet token of infamy on her breast” (Hawthorne [1850] 1974b, p. 25). Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance fills her basket with maple twigs, the leaf of which “looks like a scarlet bud in May” (Hawthorne [1852] 1977, p. 33). She then decorates her hair with one of these scarlet flowers. Miriam’s red gem also recalls Zenobia’s “hothouse flower,” worn on her breast and signaling her passion and strength, but whereas Zenobia is stripped of her flower by that novel’s close, Miriam gains her gem after her involvement in the Model’s murder. Hawthorne’s “dark” women are closely associated with the red color, which further emphasizes their sensuality and unruliness. Miriam’s red gem and Hester’s scarlet letter further symbolize their sinfulness and unlawfulness, as the red color is the color of blood.

The suggestion that Miriam’s “dark-red carbuncle” signifies menstrual “uncleanness” is symbolically potent. In Leviticus 15, menstruation is classified as a source of ritual impurity,7 a distinction that, when filtered through later Christian cultural traditions, morphed into a broader narrative of biological defilement, particularly targeting Jewish women. By the 19th century, such theological notions were secularized and absorbed into the literary imagination, where they surfaced in portrayals of Jewish women as hyper-visible, erotically charged, and inherently unstable. The red jewel becomes, in this context, a layered emblem—suggesting not only guilt or trauma but also the embodied excess of femininity itself. It points to what society fears but cannot articulate: the unruly power of the female body, especially one marked by both racial and religious difference.

Miriam’s Jewish biblical models reflect their creator’s “imagination … run on these stories of bloodshed, in which [a] woman’s hand was crimsoned by the stain” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 48). Again, their bodies are stained by blood; it is either their own blood (because they menstruate) or it is the blood of their male victims. Here, another stereotypical discourse is employed, that of the Jewish woman who emasculates men. She takes the power into her hands, seduces and then kills the male victim. The male is rendered impotent – he can neither protect his wife nor his people; the Jewish woman acts instead. The biblical Miriam, though uncontaminated by blood, took the power in her hands, when saving her brother Moses from Pharaoh’s bloody plot. Actually, one can claim that by saving baby Moses she also emasculated men, since neither her father, nor her brother, Aaron, were capable of acting on their own.

Hawthorne suggests that Miriam’s magnetism and her seductive scheme probably extend to other men besides Donatello. Late in the novel (chapter 43), Kenyon accidentally meets Miriam, while she is driving with a strange looking Italian man in a beautifully decorated carriage. Nothing is mentioned about Miriam’s partner or about her whereabouts. Yet Hawthorne implies that Miriam’s richly decorated attire, her attempt at secrecy and her highly animated mood are all directed at another conquest. Kenyon hardly recognizes Miriam because of

a gem which she had on her bosom; not a diamond, but something that glimmered with a clear, red lustre, like the stars in a southern sky. Somehow or other, this colored light seemed an emanation of herself, as if all that was passionate and glowing in her native disposition had crystallized upon her breast, and were just now scintillating more brilliantly than ever, in sympathy with some emotion of her heart.

(Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 396)

This red lustrous gem, other than symbolizing Miriam’s “passionate and glowing disposition” and the “sympathy with some emotion of her heart,” is also tightly connected to the Jewish sacred candlestick that is mentioned twice in the romance. First, the artists see it curved in marble on the Arch of Titus:

The moon shone brightly enough within it to show the seven-branched Jewish candlestick, cut in the marble of the interior. The original of that awful trophy lies buried, at this moment, in the yellow mud of the Tiber.

(Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 159)

Later in the novel, the candlestick acquires a more gleaming effect when Hilda and Kenyon speculates about its possible location in the mud of the Tiber:

Hilda wondered whether the seven-branched golden candlestick, the holy candlestick of the Jews … had yet been swept as far down the river as this … There was a meaning and purpose in each of its seven branches, and such a candlestick cannot be lost forever. When it is found again, and seven lights are kindled and burning in it, the whole world will gain the illumination which it needs … As each branch is lighted, it shall have a differently colored lustre from the other six; and when all the seven are kindled, their radiance shall combine into the intense white light of Truth.

(Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 371)

The “red lustre” of Miriam’s gem and the “colored lustre” of the Jewish candlestick are closely linked. The Jewish Miriam offers the world her sympathy, her radiance, as the Jewish candlestick, if found, will illuminate the world and will provide the “white light of Truth.”

4. The Gothic Jewess and the Refusal of Closure

While Hawthorne does not explicitly identify Miriam as Jewish, critics have long noted the subtle cues that suggest this reading. Miriam Schaefer is her assumed name, and no one in the novel knows who she really is. Only very late (in Chapter 47) does Miriam reveal some details about her past:

Then Miriam spoke of her own life, and told facts that threw a gleam of light over many things which had perplexed the sculptor in all his previous knowledge of her. She described herself as springing from English parentage, on the mother’s side, but with a vein, likewise, of Jewish blood; yet connected, through her father, with one of those few princely families of Southern Italy, which still retain great wealth and influence. And she revealed a name at which her auditor started and grew pale; for it was one that, only a few years before, had been familiar to the world in connection with a mysterious and terrible event. The reader, if he thinks it worth while to recall some of the strange incidents which have been talked of, and forgotten, within no long time past, will remember Miriam’s name…. She proceeded with her story. The great influence of her family connections had shielded her from some of the consequences of her imputed guilt. But, in her despair, she had fled from home, and had surrounded her flight with such circumstances as rendered it the most probable conclusion that she had committed suicide.

(Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, pp. 429–30)

This lengthy description, though leaving most important facts about Miriam’s identity in the dark (including her real name and association with some horrifying and mysterious events) seems to imply that her Jewishness is of importance.

Her “foreignness,” her dark beauty, her independence, and her artistic sensibility are all coded in ways that echo 19th-century representations of Jewish femininity. Her displacement in Rome, her evasive past, and her association with a murdered model hint at narratives of diaspora, secrecy, and trauma. Bryan Cheyette, referring to the depiction of Jews in 19th-century literature asserts that it is “the dangerous indeterminacy of ‘the Jews’ which … resulted in their construction as a potent threat” (Cheyette 1993, p. 270). Miriam’s ambiguous identity and refusal to conform reflect precisely this indeterminacy—she is not clearly defined, and in this ambiguity lies both her power and her perceived danger.

Hawthorne’s deliberate refusal to disclose Miriam’s origins mirrors his equally opaque treatment of the red jewel she wears—an object that glows mysteriously without visible light. This refusal of narrative resolution becomes a subtle but incisive cultural critique. Unlike the closure found in canonical texts such as Ivanhoe or The Merchant of Venice—where Jewish characters are either exiled (Rebecca) or forcibly assimilated (Jessica)—Hawthorne permits ambiguity to remain. Miriam is neither expelled nor converted. She stays. Moreover, in staying, she resists classification. Her presence disrupts the ideological logic of assimilation, containment, and narrative tidiness. By leaving her story open-ended, Hawthorne foregrounds the high cost of historical forgetting and cultural silencing. In this sense, the red jewel becomes not just a mysterious ornament; it stands as a symbol of enduring otherness, a marker of irreducible identity that resists erasure.

Viewed through this lens, the jewel functions as a kind of portable relic of cultural memory—akin to a mezuzah, an amulet, or a generational heirloom. It signifies a private connection to a collective, if unspoken, history. Yet its luminous opacity also reflects the fraught condition of Jewish representation in 19th-century literature: hyper-visible and often aestheticized, yet ultimately unknowable, destabilizing, and subject to rejection. The jewel’s inscrutability encapsulates the paradoxical position of the Jew in the Western literary imagination: both central and marginal, seductive and feared. Hawthorne’s invocation of the Gothic genre deepens this effect, allowing him to explore the spectral dimensions of history, memory, and identity. Miriam’s past—like the jewel—shimmers with both allure and threat. It is not simply hidden; it is actively haunting. This Gothic ambivalence, where beauty is inseparable from danger and trauma coexists with resilience, is central to her character. It also aligns her with a broader genealogy of literary Jewish women whose presence is marked by complexity, resistance, and symbolic excess. These women, like Miriam, defy assimilation not only in plot but in form; their unresolved stories challenge the reader’s desire for narrative closure and moral certainty.

Ultimately, Miriam embodies a vital counternarrative to the silencing mechanisms of dominant culture. Her presence—ambiguous, luminous, and haunting—insists that some identities cannot be rewritten and some histories cannot be neatly resolved. In refusing to assimilate Miriam or explain away the jewel, Hawthorne offers a rare 19th-century vision of Jewish difference not as deficiency, but as enduring, enigmatic, and necessary.

5. Cultural Memory and the Burden of Inheritance

The motif of jewelry in The Marble Faun extends beyond Miriam’s personal guilt to signify deeper cultural, religious, and historical layers, particularly through the symbolic resonance of the Etruscan bracelet. In the novel’s final pages, Miriam gives Hilda a bracelet composed of seven Etruscan gems, each “dug out of seven sepulchres,” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 462) evoking both antiquity and death. The bracelet functions as a palimpsest of layered identities: it links Miriam to an ancient, buried past and positions her suffering within a longer continuum of displacement and cultural survival. The “seven gems” subtly echo the seven-branched Jewish candlestick, the menorah, which Hawthorne references earlier in the novel as part of the Roman spoils depicted on the Arch of Titus—“cut in the marble of the interior” (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 159). The menorah, a biblical emblem of illumination and divine truth (Exodus 25:31–40), is said to be buried, at this moment, in the yellow mud of the Tiber, symbolizing both the suppression of Jewish religious identity and the invisibility of Jewish memory in dominant Christian-Roman narratives.

The convergence of the bracelet and the menorah as sevenfold symbols suggests a metaphorical inheritance of cultural trauma. The menorah, looted from the Second Temple in Jerusalem and paraded in Titus’s Roman triumph, stands as a literal and symbolic artifact of Jewish displacement and Roman conquest (Fine 2016). While the Arch of Titus relief and Fine’s reading of the menorah underscore its role as a trophy of displacement and conquest, Jewish tradition simultaneously invests the menorah with enduring symbolism of miraculous survival and divine light. Hawthorne’s description of the jewel’s “red lustre” in connection with the menorah’s “colored lustre” suggests not only a burden of memory but also the possibility of illumination and perseverance against overwhelming odds. This doubleness—the jewel as both wound and lamp—aligns with the ambivalent representation of Jewish femininity in Ingres’s Baronne de Rothschild: marked by exoticization yet insisting on visibility and presence. By drawing a parallel between this ancient relic and Miriam’s Etruscan bracelet, Hawthorne implies that Miriam herself carries a relic-like quality: she is a vessel of memory, haunted by the weight of collective suffering. The bracelet, thus, serves not merely as a token of farewell or friendship to Hilda, but as a transference of this burden—a gesture that underscores their unbridgeable cultural and spiritual distance.

Scholars such as Michael Ragussis (1995) have explored how 19th-century literature often encoded Jewishness through allegorical or aesthetic forms, particularly in the depiction of exile, suffering, and memory. In Miriam, we see such encoded Jewishness manifested through her aesthetic sensibilities, her melancholy, and her association with ancient artifacts. The “sepulchral gloom” attached to the bracelet (Hawthorne [1860] 1974a, p. 462) deepens this association, imbuing the object with funerary significance and positioning Miriam within a diasporic lineage of mourning and survival. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1982) has argued in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory—Jewish identity is historically shaped not only by events but by the imperative to remember—a process often mediated through material culture, liturgical objects, and symbolic repetition.

In gifting the bracelet, Miriam offers not only a relic of the past but a burden of remembrance. The bracelet does not resolve the rift between Miriam and Hilda; rather, it crystallizes it. Hilda—associated with Christian purity and aesthetic idealism—receives but cannot fully comprehend the historical trauma embodied in the gift. The exchange, then, dramatizes the asymmetry of memory: one woman remembers too much; the other cannot carry what she does not know.

6. Conclusions: Miriam’s Red Jewel and the Legacy of Cultural Inheritance

Miriam’s red jewel becomes a vessel of contradiction—radiant and burdened, concealed yet hyper-visible, beautiful and marked by blood. As this essay has shown, Hawthorne uses the jewel not merely to enhance Miriam’s exotic allure but to encode the traumas of exile, the limits of assimilation, and the persistent haunt of cultural memory. Her refusal to explain the jewel, and Hawthorne’s refusal to resolve her story, form a subtle but powerful challenge to dominant literary norms of closure, redemption, and containment.

Unlike other Jewish female characters in the literary canon—Jessica, who assimilates at the cost of her identity, or Rebecca, who is excluded despite her virtue—Miriam neither converts nor vanishes. She remains, scarred but luminous, carrying with her a history that cannot be fully narrated or reconciled. Her jewel, glowing with “an inner fire,” is a metonym for that unspeakable past, and for the gendered burden of memory that literature so often elides.

The jewel also connects Miriam to a long tradition of symbolic feminine adornment that carries ambivalent meaning: Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, Zenobia’s flower, Rebecca’s necklace. Yet Miriam’s jewel is distinct in its opacity. It defies moral legibility. It does not signal punishment or reward, but enduring presence. Through it, Hawthorne stages a quiet but potent resistance to the literary desire for moral clarity, assimilationist comfort, and the erasure of otherness.

In Proverbs 31, the woman of valor is said to be “far beyond rubies” in worth, and her value is defined by trust, moral strength, and constancy: “She brings him good and not harm, all the days of her life.” This idealized figure—praised for her virtue, cherished by her husband, and crowned with honor—stands in stark contrast to Hawthorne’s Gothic Jewess, whose jewel does not affirm domestic security or patriarchal trust, but signals isolation, trauma, and cultural exile. Yet Miriam, too, is a woman of valor—not by biblical standards of obedient virtue, but through her resistance, her unassimilated identity, and her refusal to relinquish her past.

In foregrounding the aesthetic and cultural work performed by jewelry in The Marble Faun, this essay has traced how Hawthorne reconfigures the Gothic Jewess not as a threat to be neutralized but as a repository of alternative memory. Miriam becomes an allegorical figure for the Jewish woman whose value lies not in redemption or resolution, but in her refusal to be silenced or fully known.

Her jewel gleams not with salvation, but with survival.