NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
The thought of Hawthorne (1804-1864) as a member of the "Concord group"
should be made with a mental reservation. He did not belong to Concord
in any literal or figurative sense, he was not an intimate of those
who did, he lived there for only seven years at two different periods
in his career, and, wherever he lived, he was in thought and conduct
anything but a group man. Yet he was a resident there for the first
three years after his marriage (1842-1846), and he developed enough of
a liking for the town to return to it for the closing four years of his
life. What the town was by tradition and what it had become through
Emerson's influence made it the most congenial spot in America for
Hawthorne.
On the other hand, he lived far longer in Salem--all but twelve out of
his first forty-six years--and he belonged to the town of his heritage
both far more and far less. Through instinctive feelings which were
quite beyond his control he belonged to Salem from the bottom of his
heart.
This old town of Salem--my native place, though I have dwelt much
away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years--possesses, or did
possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never
realized during my seasons of actual residence here.... And yet,
though invariably happiest elsewhere, there is within me a feeling
for old Salem, which, in lack of a better phrase, I must be content
to call affection. The sentiment is probably assignable to the deep
and aged roots which my family has struck into the soil. It is now
nearly two centuries and a quarter since the original Briton, the
earliest emigrant of my name, made his appearance in the wild and
forest-bordered settlement, which has since become a city. And here
his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled their
earthy substance with the soil; until no small portion of it must
necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little
while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which
I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my
countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is
perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to know.
Yet, strong as this unreasoned feeling was, to his mind the traditions
of Salem were repellent, and it offered him no attractions as a place
to live in.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure of that
first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can
remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home feeling for
the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase
of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on
account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned
progenitor ... than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my
face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a
ruler in the Church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and
evil. He was likewise a better persecutor.... His son, too, inherited
the persecuting spirit.... I know not whether these ancestors of
mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of heaven for
their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy
consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I,
the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon
myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them--as
I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the
race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist--may be now and
henceforth removed.
On this side Hawthorne's attitude toward Salem--but really toward New
England and all America--was like that of a man who has inherited debts
of honor which he feels bound to discharge, though he never would have
incurred them himself.
Hawthorne was born in this town of his affection and his distrust
on the Fourth of July, 1804. When he was four years old his father,
a shipmaster, died during a foreign voyage. The sobering effect of
this loss was increased by the way in which Mrs. Hawthorne solemnized
it, for she dedicated her life to mourning, not only withdrawing from
the outer world but even taking all her meals apart from her little
daughters and her son. An accident to the boy when he was nine years
old robbed him of healthy companionship with playmates by keeping
him out of active sports for the next three years. So he developed,
a bookish child in a muffled household. At this time he was reading
Shakespeare, Milton, and the eighteenth-century poets; later he was
to transfer allegiance to the romantic novelists. In his fifteenth
year the family lived together for several months at Raymond, Maine, a
"town" of a half-dozen houses on the shore of Sebago Lake. "There," he
told his publisher, James T. Fields, late in life, "I lived ... like a
bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed. But it was there
I first got my cursed habits of solitude." The need of proper tutoring
for college preparation caused his reluctant return to Salem, and he
was glad to escape from it again when he went back in Maine to Bowdoin
College at the age of seventeen. He was not at all eager for college,
but regarded it as an unavoidable step in his training. At the same
time he rejected the prospect of entering the church, the law, or the
practice of medicine, and even as a freshman he wrote to his mother,
"What do you think of my becoming an author, and relying for support
upon my pen?" With such a point of view he did no better work than
could have been expected. He was more interested in the reading of his
own choice than in the assigned studies. He was somewhat frivolous, and
even incurred discipline for minor offenses concerning which he wrote
to his mother with amused and amusing frankness. He finished a shade
below the middle of his class, and left Bowdoin with no more college
interest than he had brought to it.
Hawthorne's life for the twelve years which followed graduation
explains why he later referred so bitterly to his "cursed habits of
solitude." The household to which he returned from Bowdoin was almost
utterly unsocial. His mother's way of life had been adopted by his two
sisters as well. The four members of the family--one is tempted to
refer to them as "inmates"--saw very little of each other as the days
went on. The young author neither gave nor received open sympathy. His
writing, done in solitude, was not read to the rest. Conditions would
have been sufficiently abnormal if he had daily come back to this sort
of negative family experience from busy activity in the outer world,
but of the outer world he knew nothing. Not twenty people in all Salem,
he said, were even aware of his existence. If he left the house during
sunlight hours, it was to take long walks in the country. He swam in
the near-by sea before the town was stirring; he walked the streets in
the shadows of evening. His vital energy was drawn from reading and was
vented on his own manuscripts.
His writing during these years was done with patient persistence and
without any reward of applause from the public. His first novel,
"Fanshawe," was published in 1828 at his expense, was a failure,
and was subsequently suppressed--as far as the discouraged author
could recover the copies issued. From 1829 to 1836 _The Token_, an
annual put out by S. G. Goodrich of Boston, was his main channel of
publication, taking in these years about twenty-five stories and
sketches. Through Goodrich he had also found a market for his wares in
the _New England Magazine_, and toward the end of the period in the
_American Monthly Magazine_ of New York, and, best of all, with the
_Knickerbocker Magazine_, which was the periodical embodiment of the
Irving tradition and point of view. But though he was not unsuccessful
in getting his work into print, he enjoyed no reputation from it, for
only a few discriminating critics took any notice of it, and none of
these was fully aware of the author's output, since he wrote not under
one but under several pseudonyms. The lack of wholesome human contact
either at home or abroad told inevitably on Hawthorne's nerves and
temper--he had become abnormally thin-skinned--and resulted in the
touch of querulousness which the student finds from time to time in his
accounts of himself. And it also resulted in the deep self-distrust
and discouragement which grew steadily on him. "I have made a captive
of myself," he wrote finally to his old college classmate, Longfellow,
"and put me into a dungeon, and now I cannot find the key to let myself
out,--and if the door were open, I should be almost afraid to come out.
You tell me that you have met with troubles and changes. I know not
what these may have been, but I can assure you that trouble is the next
best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in this world so
horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows."
With 1837 the friendship of two college associates, Horatio Bridge, a
man of political influence and a large heart, and Franklin Pierce, soon
to be the president of the country, began to assert itself. Through
Bridge the publication of "Twice-Told Tales" was effected in 1838.
Through the influence these men were able to exert, Hawthorne was
appointed weigher and gauger in the Boston Customhouse. With this post
Hawthorne for the first time entered into active life, yet when he lost
it as a result of a change of administration in 1841 he was somewhat
relieved at the hardship. His engagement to Sophia Peabody led him next
to attempt a living solution through residence and partnership in the
Brook Farm enterprise during 1841. Again he was oppressed by having
the world too much with him, and in 1842, on his marriage, he settled
in the seclusion of Concord for his first residence of something over
three years. At the end of this time the needs of his growing family
made an assured income imperative, and once more through the political
influence at his command he was given a federal office, this time as
head of the customhouse at Salem. He held this position, like the one
at Boston, until a political reverse took it away from him in 1849.
Hawthorne was now nearly forty-six years of age. For the twelve years
following the publication of "Twice-Told Tales" he had accomplished
almost nothing in creative authorship. The human sympathy and
companionship of his marriage, much as it meant to him, was offset as
far as authorship went by the distracting need for money. With the loss
of the post at Salem the outlook was almost desperate. In the dark
hour, however, it appeared that his wife had saved a little from his
slender earnings, and in the following months he wrote what appeared,
through the friendly insistence of James T. Fields, as his first widely
recognized work--"The Scarlet Letter." The first edition of this was
exhausted in two weeks. The stimulus of popular attention encouraged
him to a rapidity of production wholly out of proportion to anything
in his earlier experience. In 1851 "The House of the Seven Gables"
was issued; in 1852 "The Blithedale Romance"; and in the meanwhile
various lesser narratives were produced. At this stage his political
friendships once more proved of value, and through the influence of
Pierce, now president, he was enabled to go abroad in the consular
service, first to Liverpool and then to Rome. His foreign residence
continued until 1860 and resulted, in authorship, in the last of his
great romances, "The Marble Faun," the book of English reminiscences,
"Our Old Home," and the "Italian Notebooks." With his return to America
he went back to Concord, but though he was quite free and undistracted
by financial worries, his major period as an author was over, and he
died in 1864, leaving behind him only the unimportant stories "Doctor
Grimshaw's Secret," "Septimius Felton," and the uncompleted "Dolliver
Romance."
In all the most obvious ways Hawthorne's literary output was a fruit
of his peculiar heritage and surroundings and his consequent manner of
life. A reading of his "American Notebooks," the product of the late
30's and the 40's, reveals how definite was the preparation for the
harvest to come. It was the gift of Hawthorne's imagination to shroud
with a kind of unreality characters and backgrounds that were drawn
from close observation. His interpretation made them his own, though
they were evidently derived from the life about him. This process
is in utter contrast, for example, with the invention of Poe. There
never were such individuals as Arthur Gordon Pym or Monsieur Dupin
or Fortunato or Roderick Usher. They are essentially human, but they
belong to no time or place. But Arthur Dimmesdale, Jaffrey Pyncheon,
Hollingsworth and Kenyon, Hester, Phoebe, Zenobia, and Miriam were
portraits, made in the image of people who had walked the streets
familiar to Hawthorne. Poe's settings are convincingly real. One can
visualize every detail of the City in the Sea or the ghoul-haunted
woodland of Weir, although one realizes that they never existed in
fact; but Boston, Salem, Brook Farm, and Rome supply actual backgrounds
for Hawthorne. Had the Puritans builded as securely as the Romans,
"The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The
Blithedale Romance" could be illustrated--as "The Marble Faun" often
has been--from photographs of surviving structures. Again, these actual
scenes and people were put into stories for which there were historical
bases, and the symbols around which they were constructed--like
the letter of scarlet and the many-gabled house--had been seen and
touched by the author. The Maypole of Merry Mount once stood on the
Wollaston hilltop, the great stone face is not yet weathered beyond all
recognition, and the legends of the Province House are amply documented.
In the Notebooks, particularly for 1835-1845, there is abundant record
of how Hawthorne's fancy was continually at play with the material
within his reach. He made definite entries as to past events and
vital associations of old buildings. He made detailed studies of odd
characters seen in his occasional little journeys into the world.
He even saved proper names, phrases, similes, epigrams which some
day might be of use: "Miss Asphyxia Davis," "A lament for life's
wasted sunshine," "A scold and a blockhead,--brimstone and wood,--a
good match," "Men of cold passions have quick eyes." But far more
significant than these explicit items are the many which are suggestive
of whole sketches or stories later to be written. Among these the
following may easily be identified: "To make one's own reflection in a
mirror the subject of a story"; "A snake taken into a man's stomach and
nourished there from fifteen years to thirty-five, tormenting him most
horribly. A type of envy or some other evil passion." "A person to be
in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to
demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely." "Some very
famous jewel or other thing, much talked of all over the world. Some
person to meet with it, and get possession of it in some unexpected
manner, amid homely circumstances." "The influence of a peculiar mind,
in close communion with another, to drive the latter to insanity."
"Pandora's Box for a child's story." "A person to be the death of his
beloved in trying to raise her to more than mortal perfection; yet this
should be a comfort to him for having aimed so highly and holily."
"To make a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes...." "A
phantom of the old royal governors, or some such shadowy pageant, on
the night of the evacuation of Boston by the British." What Hawthorne
attempted was essentially what Wordsworth did: to lift the material of
everyday life out of the realm of the commonplace.
In another and more important way Hawthorne's writings show the effect
of these long years of preparation, and that is in the self-reflection
in the majority of them, and especially in the four major romances.
In the quarter century between his graduation from Bowdoin and the
publication of "The Marble Faun," the most striking and the most
dangerous feature had been his long isolation and the resultant
effects of it. He had not withdrawn from the world in contempt; he had
insensibly drifted out of it. He was by no means indifferent to it; on
the contrary, he was increasingly sensitive to it. He needed to fill
his purse and he needed encouragement to write. Yet when he went out
into the market place he was cruelly ignored by many and shouldered
about by the hustling crowds, who were so used to their own rude ways
that they were often quite innocent of the affronts they put upon him.
It is a consequence of this unhappy experience that in the famous
romances and in many of the shorter sketches the narrative is woven
around two types--a shrinking, hypersensitive character and a rude or
insidious but always malevolent man who stands for the incarnation of
the outer world. For Hester and for Arthur Dimmesdale, for Hepzibah
and Clifford Pyncheon, for Priscilla and for Donatello, no complete
isolation is possible. No deed which involves them, whether committed
by themselves or by others, can be committed without regard to the
future. Always there is a knocking at the gate, as the outer world
insists on obtruding itself into the holiest of holies. And this
invasion is the more cruel as it is the less deserved. Chillingworth's
malign and subtle revenge on Arthur Dimmesdale is an exercise of poetic
justice. It is a horrible but not undeserved visitation. But Priscilla,
Donatello, and the two pitiful Pyncheons are innocent victims. Hepzibah
and Clifford are hounded out of life by a bland representative of the
law and the church, a wolf in the sheep's clothing of respectability.
Priscilla falls in love with a reformer, one of the type who Thoreau
complained pursued and pawed him with their "dirty institutions" and
tried to constrain him into their "desperate, odd-fellow society"; she
wilts at his touch. Donatello, the embodiment of innocent happiness, is
enmeshed in the web of society and destroyed by the fell spirit at its
center. Hawthorne never could have presented this view in its repeated
tableaux if he had not for years seen the concourse of life rush by
him, and for years made his successive efforts to reënter its currents.
The whole situation is summarized in Hawthorne's introduction of
Septimius Felton, hero of the last work of his pen. "I am dissevered
from it," he says in the opening scene. "It is my doom to be only a
spectator of life; to look on as one apart from it. Is it not well,
therefore, that, sharing none of its pleasures and happiness, I should
be free of its fatalities, its brevity? How cold I am now, while this
whirlpool is eddying all around me." Yet, a moment later he snatches
a gun and rushes out of the house to where he can see the British
redcoats passing the Concord house. He refrains from shooting, only to
be seen by a flanking party, and against his will is forced to fire
a deadly bullet. "I have seen and done such things," he says an hour
later, "as change a man in a moment.... I have done a terrible thing
for once ... one that might well trace a dark line through all my
future life." To this degree, then, Hawthorne's surroundings and his
own unfolding experience had supplied him with themes and materials.
Much of the remainder of his work had its source in his Puritan
inheritance. To this the already quoted passage on old Salem (p. 237)
bears witness. To this heritage is due in large measure the essential
gravity of his nature, which has been unfairly but suggestively
described as a compound of "seven eighths conscience and the rest
remorse"; and to this is partly attributable his absorption with the
presence and the problem of sin in the world. "The Scarlet Letter"
deals with its immediate effect on the transgressor; "The House of
the Seven Gables," with its effect on succeeding generations; "The
Blithedale Romance," with its blighting effect on the reformer, who
is selfish and heartless even in his fight against social wrong;
"The Marble Faun," with the basic reasons for the existence of evil.
Yet though the Puritan strain in him could determine the direction
of his thoughts, it could not determine their goal, for Hawthorne
recoiled from the Puritan acceptance of sin as a devil's wile to be
atoned for only through the sufferings of a mediator or the tortures
of the damned. He rejected the Calvinistic fear of eternal punishment
for the Miltonic conclusion that the mind is its own place, and of
itself can make a heaven of hell; at which point he was at one with
the Transcendentalists in substituting "for a dogmatic dread, an
illimitable hope." His indictment of the Puritans themselves was more
insistent than his charges against their theology. He condemned them
for their cruel intolerance and for the arid bleakness of their lives.
So he was at once a product of his ancestry and a living protest
against it.
But Hawthorne was more than a Puritan apostate; he was in accord with
most of the rising individualism of his day. He felt that as the result
of multitudinous changes in government, church, and industry, the
world had for the moment "gone distracted through a morbid activity"
and needed above all things a period of quiet in which to recover
its balance of judgment. So he distrusted the schemes of "young
visionaries," "gray-headed theorists," "uncertain, troubled, earnest
wanderers through the midnight of the moral world." Yet he acknowledged
that as long as the world could not be put to sleep, restlessness was
better than inertia. The radical Holgrave, in "The House of the Seven
Gables," is his most sympathetic portrait of young America. A colloquy
with Phoebe Pyncheon represents him as spokesman for the future, and
Phoebe as the voice of the placidly thoughtless present. Her remarks,
though brief, are quite as significant as his.
"'Just think a moment [he exclaims] and it will startle you to see what
slaves we are to bygone times,--to Death, if we give the matter the
right word!'
"'But I do not see it,' observed Phoebe.
"'For example then,' continued Holgrave, 'a dead man, if he happen to
have made a will, disposes of wealth no longer his own; or, if he die
intestate, it is distributed in accordance with the notions of men much
longer dead than he. A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and
living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in
dead men's books! We laugh at dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's
pathos!--We are sick of dead men's diseases, physical and moral, and
die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients!
We worship the living deity according to dead men's forms and creeds.
Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand
obstructs us. Turn our eyes to what point we may, a dead man's white
immitigable face encounters them, and freezes our very heart! And we
must be dead ourselves before we can begin to have our proper influence
on our own world, which will then be no longer our world, but the world
of another generation with which we shall have no shadow of a right
to interfere. I ought to have said, too, that we live in dead men's
houses; as, for instance, this of the Seven Gables.'
"'And why not?' said Phoebe, 'so long as we can be comfortable in
them.'"
Properly interpreted, this conversation implies vigorous criticism
of both the youthful speakers. Holgrave's sweeping protests are too
drastic, but Phoebe's placid acquiescence is deadening. As if
Hawthorne were afraid his sympathy with Holgrave would not appear,
he goes on to say that in the course of time the youth will have to
conform his faith to the facts without losing his hopes for the future,
"discerning that man's best directed effort accomplishes a kind of
dream, while God is the sole worker of realities."
It was this breadth of view, combined with his technical gifts as a
teller of tales, that made Hawthorne a great artist; for no degree of
skill or cleverness can give lasting significance to the work of a man
who has not in spirit been taken up to a high mountain and shown the
uttermost kingdoms of the world. Granted a "philosophy of life" which
inspires a man to high endeavor and enables him to see the relation
between the things that are seen and are temporal and the things that
are not seen and are eternal, the creative artist need not be always
preaching a moral or adorning a tale. The implications that he finds in
his material and the abiding convictions he has about life and death
need no labeling. They appear as a man's character does, from his daily
talk and conduct. Let the romancer state this in his own words:
When romances really do teach anything, or produce any effective
operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than
the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his
while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral,
as with an iron rod,--or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a
butterfly,--thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to
stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed,
fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step,
and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an
artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident,
at the last page than at the first.
Now and again Hawthorne forgot this, and stopped to expound and
explain, which was unnecessary. And now and again he used his powers to
vent his feelings by contemptuous portrayal of living people, holding
them up to scorn, which was unworthy. But even though he lacked the
Olympian serenity of the supreme story-tellers, he wrote as a wise
man, and he wrote surpassingly well. It remains, then, to speak of his
workmanship.
In the preface to "The House of the Seven Gables," from which the above
passage is quoted, Hawthorne discusses his methods as a romancer: how
he combines materials at hand, but makes them present the truth of
the human heart not as the realist but under circumstances of his own
choosing and with a "slight, delicate and evanescent flavor" of the
marvelous. And this shadowy unreality, he points out, comes from the
connection of "a bygone time with the very present that is flitting
away from us. It is a legend, prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray
in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along
with it some of its legendary mist." It is a cue to every one of the
longer tales and to most of the short ones. Always the outreaching hand
of the past plucking at the garments of the present,--the traditions of
an elder day or the consequences of a deed committed before the opening
of the story.
In a misty, twilight atmosphere, starting where stories frequently
end,--with a momentous act already performed,--Hawthorne's romances
proceed almost by formula. Each is dominated by a physical symbol,
itself a suggestion of some connection with the past, continually
recurrent, always half mysterious. Each is told in terms of a very
small group of characters, of whom three usually emerge farthest
from the shadows. The best of his longer works are not put into the
"well-made plot" strait-jacket; and on this point Mrs. Hawthorne's
testimony is on record that the plots grew out of the people instead
of being imposed upon them. Each is made up mostly of analytic
interpretation of moods, and each is garnished with many a meditative
commentary on the story-text. Finally, each and all of Hawthorne's
writings are characterized by a scrupulous nicety of style, a
leisureliness of sentence, a precision of diction that become the
courtly manners of the old régime. He was as simple as formality will
allow, as formal as simplicity will permit. If we are to liken him to
other writers, it will not be to any contemporaries, not even to Mr.
Howells. The comparison will take us back to Goldsmith or Jane Austen
or to those passages in Thackeray which are most reminiscent of the
elder day. Moreover, the book style of Hawthorne was something quite
apart from his letter writing, which had a masculine directness and
vigor. He was a late member of Irving's generation. When he wrote
he "took his pen in hand" to address "the gentle reader." All such
literary amenities are now the oldest of old fashions; but when they
were the vogue Hawthorne was a master of them.
BOOK LIST
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Works. There have been eighteen editions of
Hawthorne's Collected Works between 1871 and 1904 in from 6 to 18
vols. These appeared in book form originally as follows: Fanshawe,
1828; Twice-Told Tales, 1837; Grandfather's Chair, 1841; Famous
Old People, 1841; Biographical Stories for Children, 1842; Mosses
from an Old Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; True Stories,
1851; The House of the Seven Gables, 1851; A Wonder Book, 1851;
The Blithedale Romance, 1852; Tanglewood Tales, 1853; The Marble
Faun, 1860; Our Old Home, 1863; American Notebooks, 1868; English
Notebooks, 1870; French and Italian Notebooks, 1871; Septimius
Felton, 1871; The Dolliver Romance, 1876; Doctor Grimshawe's
Secret, 1883.
=Bibliography=
A volume compiled by Nina E. Browne. 1905. Also Cambridge
History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 415-424.
=Biography and Criticism=
BRIDGE, HORATIO. Personal Recollections of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
1893. (Based on three papers in _Harper's Magazine_,
January-March, 1892.)
BROWNELL, W. C. American Prose Masters. 1909.
CONWAY, M. D. Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne. 1890.
ERSKINE, JOHN. Leading American Novelists. 1910. Cambridge
History of American Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. xi.
FIELDS, J. T. Hawthorne. 1876.
FIELDS, MRS. ANNIE. Nathaniel Hawthorne. 1899.
HAWTHORNE, JULIAN. Hawthorne and his Circle. 1903.
HAWTHORNE, JULIAN. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife. 1885.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. American Notebooks.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. English Notebooks.
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. French and Italian Notebooks.
JAMES, HENRY. Nathaniel Hawthorne. 1879. (_E.M.L. Ser._)
LATHROP, GEORGE P. A Study of Hawthorne. 1876.
LATHROP, ROSE HAWTHORNE. Memories of Hawthorne. 1897.
TICKNOR, CAROLINE. Hawthorne and his Publisher. 1913.
WOODBERRY, G. E. Nathaniel Hawthorne. 1902. (_A.M.L. Ser._)
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the title essay in "Mosses from an Old Manse" and "The
Custom-House" prefatory to "The Scarlet Letter" for Hawthorne's
analysis of his feeling for the Puritan heritage.
With these in mind read "Young Goodman Brown," "Governor Endicott and
the Red Cross," and "The May-Pole of Merry Mount."
Survey the "Mosses from an Old Manse" or "Twice-Told Tales" for the
proportion of stories which are written against evident New England
background.
Identify the passages from "The American Notebooks," cited on page 243,
with the complete works for which they furnished cues.
Read "The House of the Seven Gables" for the light it throws on the
history of the Hawthorne family in the earlier generations.
Read any one of the four great romances or the three later ones with
reference to the constant recurrence of sin as a theme.
Compare this treatment of sin in Hawthorne with the treatment of crime
in Poe.
Hawthorne is chiefly interested in individual experience. Read one of
his romances for clear evidence of his social consciousness.
Discuss his success in any given story in connecting "a bygone time
with the very present that is flitting away from us."
The use of symbols in the development of his long stories is obvious.
How far does he rely upon the symbol in any one of his more effective
shorter stories?
Glance over several short stories to see if any can be found in which
action is not subordinated to its effect on the character who commits
it.
Read a selected chapter or two, such as the earlier ones in "The
House of the Seven Gables," for observation on Hawthorne's style,
particularly on the quiet play of humor in it.