Authors
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
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The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1962–97), published by the Ohio State University Press, is now complete and offers a comprehensive scholarly edition of Hawthorne’s letters, journals, children’s writings, romances, stories and sketches, and nonfiction. An outstanding recent biography is Brenda Wineapple’s Hawthorne: A Life (2003); this should be supplemented with James Mellow’s Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times (1980) and T. Walter Herbert’s Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (1993). Rita K. Gollin’s illustrated Portraits of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1983) is intriguing. John L. Idol and Buford Jones edited Hawthorne: The Contemporary Reviews (1994). Other books also survey Hawthorne’s reputation: B. Bernard Cohen’s The Recognition of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1969), J. Donald Crowley’s Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (1970), and Gary Scharnhorst’s Nathaniel Hawthorne: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism before 1900 (1988). For critical essays see Michael Colacurcio’s New Essays on “The Scarlet Letter” (1985), Albert J. von Frank’s Critical Essays on Hawthorne’s Short Stories (1991), Millicent Bell’s New Essays on Hawthorne’s Major Tales (1993), Claudia D. Johnson’s Understanding “The Scarlet Letter”: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (1995), John L. Idol Jr. and Melissa Ponder’s Hawthorne and Women: Engendering and Expanding the Hawthorne Tradition (1999), Larry J. Reynolds’s A Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2001), Richard H. Millington’s The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004), and Bell’s Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays (2005). Leland S. Person’s Norton Critical Edition of The Scarlet Letter and Other Writings (2005) collects a wide range of primary and secondary texts; see also James McIntosh’s Norton Critical Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales (1987) and Robert S. Levine’s Norton Critical Edition of The House of the Seven Gables (2006). The scholarship on Hawthorne is rich and voluminous. Essential studies include Frederick Crews’s The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966), Michael Davitt Bell’s Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (1971), Nina Baym’s The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (1976), Michael Colacurcio’s The Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales (1984), Richard Brodhead’s The School of Hawthorne (1986), Baym’s The Scarlet Letter: A Reading (1986), Gordon Hutner’s Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (1988), Sacvan Bercovitch’s The Office of the Scarlet Letter (1991), Joel Pfister’s The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1991), Richard Millington’s Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne’s Fiction (1992), Samuel Chase Coale’s Mesmerism and Hawthorne (1998), and Clark Davis’s Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement (2005).
Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, a descendant of Puritan ancestors, including one of the judges of the Salem witchcraft trials. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he had become friends with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and later president of the United States Franklin Pierce, and then returned to Salem to write. Hawthorne's early endeavors were mostly short stories, but even though he published many of these tales in magazines and literary annuals, they always appeared anonymously and did little to advance his literary career. Only when he published these stories in collections, as in Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), did Hawthorne become a recognized literary force. In 1842 he married Sophia Peabody of Salem, and Hawthorne's primary focus turned to family. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, appeared in 1850 and became an international sensation, with critics in Great Britain and the United States proclaiming him the finest American romance writer. Other novels by Hawthorne include The House of Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860).
"Rappaccini's Daughter" (If you do not have Acrobat Reader, download here. )
Questions for Discussion and Writing
My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832) and Young Goodman Brown (1835) are two famous Hawthorne stories, tales that are often strip-mined for allegorical signification. If we assume a good narrative ought to be more than the sum of its symbols, then we can ask what more there is to these two stories, and to Hawthorne as an artist, rather than as a mere allegorizer of human experience.
1. In My Kinsman, Major Molineux, most attention focuses on the moral or symbolic significance of Robin's outburst of laughter when he sees his kinsman humiliated by the Boston revolutionaries. But what about this as a psychological moment, as a revelation or confirmation of Robin's emotional state? Is this a believable response from a young man who has been through the sort of night that Robin has experienced? Does this fit of laughter suggest anything about his character or about what he has learned -- as an individual rather than as an emblem of young, naive New England?
2. In My Kinsman, Major Molineux, Hawthorne represents eighteenth-century Boston, about forty years before the Revolution, as a festive place, where masque and anarchy and playfulness have taken over the streets as a result of the widening political rift between England and the colonies. How does this portrait compare with other representations which you have seen of Boston in pre-Revolutionary times?
3. Working from the obvious cues in Young Goodman Brown, we can read Brown's wife, Faith, as a representation of his own religious "faith" and map out the color symbolism to understand the story as a commentary on innocence or purity, sin or the world of the flesh, and the complications of living in a world where these qualities are mingled. But is Brown a plausible human being? What internal conflicts take him on this wilderness errand? What does he want when he ventures into the woods?
