New Makers of Modern Culture

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel 1804-64
US writer

'A man of a deep and noble nature', 'this Portuguese diamond in our American Literature'—in these, and similar warm, acclaiming phrases Herman Melville announced his celebrated 'shock of recognition' on first reading Hawthorne (in his pseudonymous review of Mosses from an Old Manse for the influential New York weekly, the Literary World, 17 and 24 August 1850). He wrote as an enthusiast, and doubtless in extravagant homage to a fellow author and countryman whose powers he thought exceptional, at times even Shakespearian. But it was a rare act of tribute, as eloquent as it was generous. It was also prophetic, for in Hawthorne's own time, on both sides of the Atlantic, he tended to be judged a voice pitched essentially in minor key, too bound by ancestral New England Puritanism, that determining American legacy of Calvinist theology and conscience, profound sexual suspicion, heresy and witchcraft, which began in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and the founding colonies of the eastern seaboard and which cast its shadow deep into Hawthorne's own time. And if not depicted as merely the custodian of America's supposed gloomy Puritan past, he was thought a narrow homespun 'allegorist', an adept in the art of the 'picturesque' and the 'quaint'. In each of these characterizations, almost unwittingly, Hawthorne's critics drew on the persona he took great pains first to bring into being, then foster, that of the reticent, unavailing, 'occasional' writer. The 'inmost Me', however, as he refers to himself in The Scarlet Letter (1850), too rarely won recognition.

If Melville allowed his generosity to get slightly the better of him in designating Hawthorne 'a commanding mind', he was right to think him anything but 'harmless', an easily accounted for New England local colourist. For Hawthorne brooded long, even obsessively, over his craft, a challenging literary as well as moral intelligence who is now properly regarded, with Melville himself, as belonging to the 'American Renaissance', the mid-nineteenth-century efflorescence of thought and letters inaugurated by Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836) and which embraces landmark American works like Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (first edition, 1855), Emily Dickinson's nearly two thousand 'hidden' poems, and Hawthorne's own crucial The Scarlet Letter, his three subsequent romances, and his short-story collections. To Henry James, writing in his 'English (sic) Men of Letters' monograph, Hawthorne (1879), it was Hawthorne's mastery of his pictographic stories and of the romance form which—albeit with major reservations—led him to pronounce the New Englander no less than 'a beautiful, natural, original genius', a subtle and admired forbear. From a yet later perspective, in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), D.H. Lawrence also paid tribute to Hawthorne, insisting like Melville upon his 'daemonic' and far from picturesque qualities, his watchful insights into human psychology and dark, ensnaring equivocations and chiaroscuro. Of this 'duplicitous' Hawthorne, wonderfully disingenuous and full of covert meanings, he writes engagingly 'blue-eyed Nathaniel knew disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.'

Hawthorne was born into old Massachusetts family stock (one ancestor was a judge in the Salem witch trials). He lost his sea-captain father at four; developed his characteristic penchant for solitude and inward self-doubt and contemplation in childhood sojourns at Lake Sebago, Maine; numbered the poet Longfellow, and a future president, Franklin Pierce, among his classmates at Bowdoin College (1821-5); after which, in his 'haunted chamber' at his mother's gabled house in Salem, he pursued a life of intense private study, mainly in literature and American Puritan and revolutionary history (1825-37). In 1828, he published Fanshawe, a derivative Gothic adventure-narrative, which he later sought to withdraw from circulation, but which gave notice of his coming skills as a romancer. The mainly anonymous stories he had been publishing since 1832, and others hitherto unprinted, were issued as Twice-Told Tales in 1837. In this event, and his engagement to Sophia Peabody, invalid sister of the influential Transcendentalist luminary and educator, Elizabeth Peabody, he believed the world 'had called me forth'. In 1839-40, he worked as measurer of salt and coal in the Boston Custom House. He returned to print in 1841 with his child's history of New England, Grandfather's Chair, the same year he bought $1,000 worth of shares in (and briefly lived and worked at) Brook Farm, the utopian, Fourier-inspired, Transcendentalist community experiment led by George Ripley, which attracted the likes of Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson, and to which he hoped to take Sophia. The Blithedale Romance (1862) casts an ironic backward glance at that experience. Having married Sophia, a marriage to which both gave themselves devotedly over a lifetime, in 1842 he moved into the Old Manse at Concord, formerly the Emerson family home, in which he composed most of the stories for Mosses from an Old Manse (1846).

In 1846 the Hawthornes returned to Salem, where, until 1849, when the incoming Whig administration of General Zachary Taylor, as Hawthorne said, 'politically decapitated' him, he served as surveyor of the Custom House—a post he held for party efforts on behalf of the Democrats. His unceremonious expulsion from office evidently spurred his creative energies (his imagination he describes as having become 'a tarnished mirror'), for in 1850 he published his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, whose prefatory 'The Custom House', among other things, casts a rueful eye upon the precariousness of political appointment. In high dudgeon, with Sophia and their two children, Julian and Una (the model for Pearl in The Scarlet Letter—a third child, Rose, was born in 1851), he left Salem for Lenox, in western Massachusetts, and from there was able to witness—no doubt with wry added satisfaction given the circumstances which led to its composition—the widespread praise elicited by The Scarlet Letter. Within a couple of years he had written his second romance, The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a 'history' ostensibly of two New England dynasties, the Pyncheons and the Maules, which like The Scarlet Letter mediates brilliantly between the nineteenth and seventeenth centuries, a story of memory and heritage exploring the 'wizardry' of art as against 'authority', the uses and dangers of vested individual power. There followed in turn another story collection, The Snow Image And Other Twice-Told Tales (1852), and two volumes for children intriguingly adapted from classical mythology, A Wonder Book (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853).

During the stay in the Berkshires, Melville's 'Hawthorne and His Mosses' appeared (by a fortuitous stroke Melville and his family were living on a farm in nearby Pittsfield), which led to an immediate, congenial exchange of visits and letters. For all that the relationship was more sought, and acted upon, by Melville ('The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds,' he wrote to Hawthorne in November 1851), and despite Hawthorne's native reticence and his diplomatic efforts to check the younger author's effusiveness, it remains a relationship as momentous as any in the literary history of America. In 1852, Hawthorne published The Blithedale Romance, a querying, radically ironic narrative about motive and idealistic community schemes for human progress, which embodies in its narrator, Miles Coverdale, an authorial 'presence' as masked as Hawthorne himself was often thought to be. He also, in 1852, wrote a campaign biography, symptomatically conservative in emphasis, for his college friend, Franklin Pierce, whose Democratic presidency led to a consular appointment for him in Liverpool (1853-7), which he interpreted not as a sinecure but a set of duties to be performed with scrupulous care and energy. After a three-year term, and in worsening health, he moved his family to Italy (1857-9), the setting for his last full-length work, The Marble Faun (1860), a story of murder and New World initiation into the 'fallen' world of Rome and almost Jamesian in its working of 'the international situation'. These European years also yielded his shrewd portrait of English life and manners, Our Old Home (1863), his French and Italian Notebooks (1871) and English Notebooks (1870) which—when taken with the American Notebooks (1868) and despite the careful pruning by Sophia and her advisers—are indispensable to an understanding of Hawthorne's view of his role as author, and his compositional habits and major themes. Against failing spirits, he continued to write, leaving behind four fragments, all posthumously published, Septimius Felton (1872), The Dolliver Romance (1876), Dr Grimshawe's Secret (1883) and The Ancestral Footstep (1883). At his funeral, in May 1864, the mourners included Emerson and almost every writer of consequence in New England.

The sources of Hawthorne's fictional art, whether his romances or short stories, lie in his reading of the great Reformation allegorists, Bunyan, Spenser and Milton especially, and of the King James Bible and the vast 'typological' and emblematic literature of the American Puritans—sermons, annals, meditations—in which he steeped himself. Of nearer writers, he looked to Goldsmith, Washington Irving, and pre-eminently Sir Walter Scott. But he sought always his own cast of narrative, neither allegory entirely, nor the novel or story as evolved in nineteenth-century England and Europe in which life could be portrayed three-dimensionally and from the perspective of society dense in manners and historic tradition. Most often, thus, his fiction is pageant-like, narration as dialectical sequences of 'pictures', 'tableaux', emblematic moments and exchanges. His Notebooks and different prefaces set out this fictional domain with considerable precision. In The House of the Seven Gables he speaks of claiming 'a certain latitude, both as to … fashion and material, which he would not have felt entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel'. The Blithedale Romance he situates 'a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of their lives.' Perhaps more explicitly still, in 'The Custom House', he proposes his fictional world as 'neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.' Nowhere better does Hawthorne exploit his 'neutral territory' than in his major romance, The Scarlet Letter. The triangulation of Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, their shifting relationship with the elfin child Pearl, the play of Puritan values as against those of the 'forest', individual freedom as against community regulation—all are set within an 'intermediate' narrative world whose ambiguous centre is the dazzling scarlet 'A' worn by Hester, an emblem at once a source of conflicting definition and a means of defining its very definers.

Hawthorne's principal stories rely equally upon an equivocating play of viewpoint, language and tone, throwing the burden of 'interpretation' with unusual sharpness upon the reader. He once aptly likened his stories to mosses, implantings meant to take root, and grow, almost unnoticed, in the reader's consciousness. They offer, time and again, meticulous, contemplative picturings of hidden guilt, isolation, the will-to-power, sexual and creative self-expression brought into conflict with the prevailing community standard. In his tales of the 'Unpardonable Sin' (defined as a 'want of love and reverence for the Human Soul'), he depicts the lonely, 'scientific' man of power, usually a Chillingworth-like figure, estranged from the necessary values of the heart - tales like 'Ethan Brand', 'The Birthmark', 'Egotism; or the Bosom Serpent', or 'Rappaccini's Daughter'. His more overtly historical stories, which rework Puritan and revolutionary material—'The Maypole of Merry Mount', for instance, or 'Endicott And The Red Cross', or 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux'—seek from the American past more enduring meanings, about the place of art in society, about crime and punishment, or about the losses and gains in the birth of any nation. Others look to Puritanism as a continuing and representative body of behaviour which can close down mutual sexual trust as in 'Young Goodman Brown'; or to the folly of an uncritical belief in progress as in his Bunyanesque satire of Transcendentalism, 'The Celestial Railroad'; or to the artist's role itself, one of ambiguous, self-knowing power, as in 'The Artist of the Beautiful'. If Hawthorne's equivocations occasionally border on mystification, or suggest unsureness or simple sleight-of-hand, they work far more often to striking imaginative effect. He belongs in the central line of Poe, Melville, Twain and James, the shaping—and resonantly American—intelligence behind the romance and his own 'disguised' New World visions of perennial human frailty.

A. Robert Lee

See: Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (1948); Roy R. Male, Hawthorne's Tragic Vision (1957); Hawthorne Centenary Essays, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce (1964); Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. A.N. Kaul (1964); Studies in the Novel, Nathaniel Hawthorne Special Number, vol. 2, no. 4 (Winter 1970); Frederick C. Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes (1966); Nathaniel Hawthorne: New Readings, ed. A. Robert Lee (1982); Richard H. Millington, The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004); Sarah Bird Wright (ed.), Critical Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Literary Reference to his Life and Work (2005); Philip McFarland, Hawthorne in Concord (2005).

See Also: Ralph Waldo Emerson; Herman Melville; Henry David Thoreau; Walt Whitman; Emily Dickinson; Henry James; D.H. Lawrence; H. W. Longfellow; and Mark Twain.

Sample Entries