NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

(1804-64)

BACKGROUND

  • born on the 4th of July
  • Salem, Massachusetts
  • added “W” to his name
  • paternal heritage -->  THEMES, STYLE, TOPICS
    • William Hathorne: came to New England with John Winthrop, 1630
    • Judge John Hathorne: his son, unrepentant burner of witches
      • (Salem Witch Trials, 1692)
    • Daniel Hathorne: grandfather, courageous privateer during American Revolution
    • Nathaniel Hathorne: father = sea captain
      • died when NH was 4 years old (1808)
      • yellow fever, in far-off Suriname
    • Nathaniel Hawthorne: writer = END of 200-year sear-faring family tradition:
      • “a gray-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarterdeck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took his hereditary place before the mast”
      • (see Faulkner)
  • mother =
    • recluse (Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne),
    • moved from Salem to Maine
    • Maine “inlanders”
    • to college, rather than off to sea
  • sisters = Elizabeth, Louisa
  • 1808:
    • 4: FATHER: Dutch Guiana (1808)
  • maternal uncles:
    • responsible for his education
  • early teens:
    • lived in Sebago Lake, Maine (still part of U Massachusetts)
    • lived "free as a bird", acquired a love of “tramping” (life-long)
  • mid-teens: reading
    • 18thC writers
      • (Henry Fielding, Thomas Smollett, Horace Walpole.....GOTHIC)
    • & contemporaries
      • (William Godwin, Sir Walter Scott....ROMANCE)
  • 1821-24: college = Bowdoin College
    • Brunswick, Maine;
    • secluded, wooded, close to mother & sisters
    • shy,
    • lasting friendships w/ Franklin Pierce (president), Horatio Bridge, as part of the Democratic Literary Society (HW Longfellow = part of rival Federalist Society)
  • 1825-37:
    • HERMIT YEARS:
    • returned home to Salem,
    • tramping throughout New England in summers on uncle's stage-lines, apprenticeship writing,
    • *steeped in Colonial history as opposed to the political issues of his time
    • writer, contributor to magazines, editor (American Magazine, with his sister Elizabeth), wrote or selected contents; resigned b/c not enough money ($$$$)
  • 1828: Fanshawe (begun in college, published at his own expense, burned unsold copies, Marsh and Capen bookstore fire burned many; denied authorship for years)
  • early (failed) collections:
    • burned, broken up, broken up:
    • Seven Tales of My Native Land, collection of short stories (burned most stories, recycled rest);
    • Provincial Tales (1829, not published as a single book; broken up & published in magazines);
    • The Storyteller (planned, not published, themed around a traveling storyteller)
    • short stories in magazines & literary annuls (genteel Christmas gifts, *anonymous*)
  • 1836: turned to "literary hack work"
    • made an encyclopedia for Samuel G. Goodrich (publisher of The Token, which published most of NH's tales)
  • 1837: children’s books:
    • compiled (1837 Peter Parley’s Universal History, with sister Elizabeth), 1841 Grandfather’s Chair, 1841 Famous Old People, 1841 Liberty Tree, 1842 Biographical Stories for Children
  • 1837: Twice-Told Tales:
    • short story collection
    • editions in 1842, 1851 with additional (slighter, weaker) stories
    • not organized around a theme/idea (as he tried to do with the earlier works)
    • reference to Shakespeare’s King John 3.4:
      • "Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale / Vexing the dull eare of a drowsie man."
    • 1st edition: repaid college friend’s (Horatio Bridge) guarantee; NH’s name appeared on the title page (fame); little profit
    • *start of NH's public literary career (fame); local celebrity
    • 2nd edition: no profit, not even to cover publication costs
    • 3rd edition: some profit ($$$$$)
    • (see "Psychological Themes" below)
    • personal essays
    • psychological fiction (“Minister’s Black Veil”)
    • “science fiction” (“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”)
    • essays on the responsibilities of the artist (“Prophetic Pictures”)
    • “The Grey Champion” (fictionalized history)
    • “Endicott and the Red Cross” (fictionalized history)
    • “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”
    • “May-Pole”
      • mythic story
      • psychological, theological, philosophical interpretations
      • prelapsarian paradise vs. postlapsarian Puritan world
      • Merry Mount:
        • Prior to knowledge of sin, guilt, restraint
        • self-indulgent gaiety, lighthearted sexuality
        • superficial pleasure w/o joy, passion
      • Puritan:
        • self-restraint, dogma, lifeless, sterile
      • *anti-Utopian: only by losing earthly paradise does the couple learn to reconcile that life is sorrow & joy (balance)
      • (GOOD & EVIL) (Felix Culpa)

BACKGROUND

  • 1837: Elizabeth Peabody, Salemite, to become a major force in American education reform, took an interest in the local celebrity
    • --> met her sister Sophia (29, invalid)
    • engaged within a few months
  • 1839-41: measurer at Boston Custom House (measuring salt & coal), with help of Sophia’s sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody ($$$$$)
  • (wrote little—children’s books, TTT #2)
  • 1840: Brook Farm Experiment
    • (Transcendentalists, George Ripley):
    • business investment $$$
    • manual labor --> little energy to write
    • setting for 1852 Blithedale Romance
  • 1842-45: moved to Concord w/wife, wrote again, Mosses
  • 1846: Mosses from the Old Manse:
    • short story collection (not unified collection)
    • “somewhat formulaic stories & sketches”;
    • “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
    • most previously published in magazines, 1830s
    • some passed over twice for editions in TTT
    • promised to be his last collection of short fiction
      • (moving on to romance novels)
  • 1842:
    • friends with those in the Transcendentalist Movement;
    • July, marries Sophia Peabody, who was an active member of the Transcendentalists
    • marriage --> may not write any more:
    • “when a man has taken upon himself to beget children, he has no longer any right to a life of his own”)
    • children:
      • Una Hawthorne (1844-1877)
      • Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934)
      • Rose Hawthorne (1851-1926)
  • 1842-45: idyllic Old Manse, Concord, Massachusetts (Emerson's ancestral home), wrote child's history of colonial & revolutionary New England (1841 Grandfather's Chair)
  • 1846: moved in with mother, surveyor of Port Salem ($$$$$: not enough money as a writer)
  • 1846: Mosses from the Old Manse:
    • new tales: “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
    • old tales: “Young Goodman Brown,” “Roger Malvin's Burial”
    • headnote to "RD": “M. de l'Aubepine [French for Hawthorne] had an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions”
    • AND 1851 edition: “[the author] on internal evidence of his sketches, came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name...”
      • = 1) Hawthorne's creation of a public persona &
      • 2) his way of diffusing some of the criticism from realists about these stories (disarming self-criticism)
    • *growing readership, not profit (growing fame, not riches)
  • 1846-49: Surveyor of the Port of Salem (from years of service to local Democrats), worked at "Custom House"
    • --> wrote a little,
    • --> see long introduction to The Scarlet Letter (revenge on Salem Whigs)
  • 1849: controversially thrown out of office by new Whig
    • administration, mother died in summer, started Scarlet Letter
    • originally planned as a long tale, half a collection of stories
    • convinced to expand b/c longer work would sell better ($$$)
    • manages to evoke sympathy for heroine while condemning her actions
  • 1850: Scarlet Letter
  • 1851: lived in Berkshire Mountains (western Mass.), good friends with Herman Melville (his dedication to Moby Dick), House of the Seven Gables (family curse, autobiographical), assembled early pieces in The Snow-Image, A Wonder-Book (for children)
  • 1852: Blithedale Romance & campaign biography of Franklin Pierce
  • 1853: The Tanglewood Tales (stories from mythology)
  • 1853-57: college friend Franklin Pierce = president
  • NH = “American Consul at Liverpool”
    • had written a campaign biography for/of Pierce, old college friend
    • (*breaks creative output period)
  • *1850-54 = creative productive period*
    • sightseeing of inns, castles, galleries, museums; recorded his observations of people in notebooks (see below)
  • 1858: tour of Italy; terribly cold, malaria almost killed daughter Una
  • 1860 Marble Faun
    • from notebook accounts of traveling, meetings w/ writers, sculptors, painters
    • written in, placed in Italy
    • (* last completed novel)
  • $$$:  depleting accounts:
    • travels in England & Italy
    • refitting The Wayside (Concord, Mass. home, 1st he owned),
    • unwise loans to friends
  • hackwork #2:
    • sketches published from English notebooks (Atlantic Monthly),
    • published collectively in 1863 as Our Old Home
  • CIVIL WAR: sympathies towards the South
  • 1864: dead--May 19, 1864:
    • (stomach cancer)
    • traveling in New Hampshire w/ Franklin Pierce on curative trip through mountains to restore his mental & physical vigor,
    • left romances begun unfinished;
    • pallbearers included = Emerson, Alcott, Fields, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell
    • buried at Author’s Ridge, the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts among his many friends including the Alcotts, Emerson, and Thoreau

THEMES

  • hypocrisy

  • witchcraft

  • guilt (Puritan guilt), effects of guilt

    • secret sin & its effect on the individual (psychology)

    • guilt: has its own existence, independent of the original cause

  • confession = healing, cleansing ritual

  • sins of the father

  • hidden motivations of characters

    • (*one of the 1st American writers to explore these*)

  • NH: “magnetic chain of humanity”

  • city/civilization VS. woods/wilderness:

    • order, reason, control, restraint, rigidity;

  • hypocrisy

    • Scarlet Letter

    • “Young Goodman Brown”

 

PSYCHOLOGICAL THEMES

(in editions of Twice-Told Tales)

  • consequences of pride, selfishness, secret guilt
  • the conflict between lighthearted & somber attitudes towards life
  • the difficult in preventing isolation from leading to coldness of heart
  • the impingement of the past (esp. the PURITAN past) upon the present
  • the futility of comprehensive social reforms
  • the impossibility of eradicating sin from the human heart
    • (2 in 1)
  • **curiosity regarding the recesses of human beings

THEMES

  • FELIX CULPA:

    • “Minister’s Black Veil”

    • “May-Pole”

    • Scarlet Letter

  • GOOD & EVIL coexist within the human soul:

    • (apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil)

    • “the necessity of coming to terms with one’s own human condition,” to reconcile the reality of human limitations/frailties & the intermingling of good and evil within a single soul

    • otherwise = ISOLATION:

      • from community, true self, chance of redemptive love

    • “Minister’s Black Veil”

    • “YGB”:  “Brown is unable to reconcile himself to the fact that the people he has admired in his youth participate in the sinfulness that for Hawthorne is part of the essential human condition. After his forest visit Brown can see only the darker side of human nature and cannot reconcile himself to the inherent tension in human beings between the forces of light and those of darkness. Through this journey into the wilderness Brown achieves KNOWLEDGE, but he lacks the WISDOM to reconcile the adult experience of sin and guilt as characteristics of human nature with his childishly naïve need to view people as unambiguously either good or evil. The result is IGNORANCE of his own complex nature and ISOLATION from the community as well.”

      • “…the universal experience of awakening awareness and the necessity of incorporating one’s new knowledge into the adult psyche as a natural aspect of growth”

      • beyond the self-righteousness of post-adolescence

    • God-like attempts to improve nature, perfect imperfect humanity

 

 

 

STYLE

  • keen psychological analysis of people he met,
  • master of psychological insight, character studies
  • anti-realism, "shadowiness"
  • ALLEGORY:
    • “the mysterious”: (allegory)
      • the meeting place of reality & fantasy
      • NH: “neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other”
  • SYMBOLISM:
    • historical (fictionalized history)
    • history =
      • symbols of deeper truths
      • a point of departure (not an end)
    • saw symbols in past events
    • characters --> allegory
    • creates symbolic power, mythic dimensions
    • “Grey Champion,” “Endicott & the Red Cross,” “Howe’s Masquerade”
  • his ancestral roots --> affiliation to Salem
    • fondness for the area
    • moral quality (associated with his ancestry)
      • --> “concern for the secrets of the human heart”
    • informed his imagination as a child
  • myth-making
  • SETTINGS:
    • Salem, Massachusetts & Puritans (*best writings*)
    • American Revolutionary period
  • British models (college education) BUT American style
    • early works = imitative (esp. Sir Walter Scott’s romances, Gothic vision)
    • --> why he burned early books???
  • “AMERICAN”
    • American past (Puritan era, Revolutionary era)
    • American setting
    • “national fiction rooted in the American experience”
  • public (community, shared myths) & private (psychology)
  • scholar-idealist character type (“The Ambitious Guest”)

 STYLE

  • AMBIGUITY:
    • leaves unresolved certain conflicts, interpretations
      • good or evil??
    • creates “shades of gray”
    • *** human soul = mixture of GOOD and EVIL***
    • Endicott: symbol of American Revolution OR Puritan intolerance
  • PSYCHOLOGY:
    • psychological allegories
      • (forest = subconscious)
    • effects of guilty mind
    • repression of Puritan society
    • unconscious mind
    • id, ego, superego (see “May-Pole”)
    • dream-like journeys
    • awareness & reconciliation of sexual (sinful) nature
      • --> adult psyche
    • fathers vs. sons (Oedipal Complex)
    • monomania (obsession) --> downfall (of the person & those he loves)
      • pursuit of ideals to improve upon nature
      • (“Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”)
  • MONOMANIA (obsession)
    • leads to downfall (of the person & those he loves)
    • pathological pursuit of ideals
    • to improve upon nature
      • (“Birthmark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter”)
    • pride, God-like
    • God-like attempt to perfect humanity
    • Faustian quality/quest
  • GENRES:
    • sketches of contemporary American life
    • allegory (historical, scientific, artistic)
    • romance novels
    • “science fiction” stories (allegory)
       

 

 

STORIES

 STORIES

LINKS LINKS