Who Was Hawthorne?

HAWTHORNE – HIS LIFE AND WORKS

Nathaniel Hawthorne was unquestionably the first major writer of the United States. Earlier, Cooper had introduced a distinctively American voice into fiction, but his novels are often “formless and inarticulate.” Poe’s stories contain many flashes of brilliance, yet these remain merely flashes and are often marred by ‘affectation’ and ‘carelessness’. Hawthorne, however, was the finest literary embodiment of the New England traditions in which he was so deeply imbued. He inherited characteristic puritan pre-occupations with sin, with guilt and with secrecy—and became at once their chronicler and critic.

Hawthorne was one of the most historically-minded of the major American novelists. From his first tales of the final unlimited romances he turned again and again to history—particularly to the early history of his Native New England, which provided the material for his greatest novel and for many of his best tales. Hawthorne’s major achievements are the four novels—The Scarlet Letter , The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and Marble Faun and a collection of short stories known as Twice Told Tales. His best work is a blending of the elements of realism, allegory and symbolism into a form that he himself likes to call ‘romance’. He did not consider himself a novelist. Rather he preferred to be considered a romancer. Hawthorne’s fiction belongs to the highest form of art. His unified tone is one of repose, he consistently seeks truth and above all, he has “invention, creation imagination, originality—traits which in the literature of fiction, are possibly worth all the rest.” Before we have a detailed view of Hawthorne’s works, it would be pertinent to look at his life.

Hawthorne was born in 1804 at Salem, Massachusetts of an old local family whose members had included John Hawthorne, one of the judges of the Salem witch trials of 1692. Referring to the influence of his ancestors on him in “The Custom House, Chapter of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne says, “The figures of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far as I can remember………He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church, he had all the puritantic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor; as witnessed by the Quakers, who have remembered him in their histories, and related an incident of his hard severity towards a woman of their sect, which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any records of his better deeds, although they were many. His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be used to have left a stain upon him.” But Hawthorne’s immediate ancestors followed the sea and his father died in 1808 at Surinam, when he was only four years old. When he was twelve, his mother took him to live with her brother in Raymond, Maine.

Like Sir Walter Scott, Hawthorne was partially, though in this case, temporarily incapacitated in early life by a leg injury. During this period he developed a habit of solitude and a taste for reading, that was to remain with him in varying intensity for the rest of his life. At school, Nathaniel Hawthorne did not distinguish himself in any way but his schooling was uninterrupted. He left school with no greater blot on his record than being fined fifty cents on one occasion for gambling. After a solitary childhood that left a lasting mark of somber reserve on his character, Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Buruswick, Maine. At college, he became friendly with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce who later helped him in publishing Twice Told Tales. Though Hawthorne did not prove himself to be a brilliant student, he was not indifferent to his mother, “I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, not a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So, I don’t see that there is anything left for me but to be an author.”

On his return to Salem he read widely and began his own first tentative literary efforts. Fanshawe a brief autobiographical romance was published anonymously in 1828. The novel was a partial self-portrait of the lonely scholar grappling with the problem of living his own life and at the same time adjusting with the society. In Fanshawe, the words of thought and of reality were separate and irreconcilable; they were so for Hawthorne also. His personal story is one of a constant efforts to adjust to living while preserving his own spiritual integrity, his tales, were various treatment of this major theme. It was neither a commercial nor a literary success.

During the period 1825-37, Hawthorne made many walking tours of the more remote parts of New England, with the aid of an ‘uncle who had a well-established stage coach business. To The Token and other magazines he contributed stories, essays and sketches afterwards collected in Twice Told Tales (1837, 1842). Mosses from an Old Manse (1847) and The Snow Image and other Twice Told Tales (1852). In 1836, he edited a short lived periodical, American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge for Samuel Griswold Goodrich’. With the publication of his collection of short stories, Hawthorne’s genius had been noted in London Athenaeum, but recognition in America was slow in coming. For the same publisher, he and his sister compiled Peter Parley’s Universal History, Grand Father’s Chair. Stories of New England, History Retold for Children, appeared in 1841-42. in 1838, the historian George Bancroft, the then collector of the port of Boston, appointed him to the Boston Custom House, a job he held until 1841. he made an experiment in communal living at the socialistic settlement of Brook Farm near Boston where some enlightened persons like the famous Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist, congregated to live close to nature. He was hoping that he would somehow find it easier to support a wife in the environment. However, it was soon obvious that the plan was as uncomfortable as it was unlikely. and upon his marriage in 1842 Hawthorne settled at Old Manse, Ralph Waldo, Emerson’s family home in Concord, Massachusetts. Hawthorne’s mixed feelings towards the Brook Farm experiment are demonstrated in the The Blithedale Romance (1852). Describing the significance of the period from 1837 to 1845, Randall Stewart in his biography of Hawthorne, remarks, “these years greatly enriched Hawthorne’s experience of life. The summers in August in North Adams, the two years in the Boston Custom House, and six or seven months at Brook Farm enlarged his knowledge of men. His courtship and marriage taught him all that a passionate, devoted love can teach. He experienced the joys and trails of parenthood, he felt the responsibilities belonging to the head of a family. he profited like other men from what Francis Bacon called “The discipline of humanity.” When Hawthrone lost a portion of his savings in Brook Farm, he was again forced to accept another custom house job—his time as a surveyor in Salem. This job improved his financial position to a very great extent but “it seriously interfered with his writing work. As he says in “The Custom House”, I had ceased to be a writer of tolerable poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like an otter out of a phial; so that at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residum. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually preying into my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of deteriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I could stay in the custom house, and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension, as it would never be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet in individual as myself, and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign, it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow grey and decrepit in the surveyorship.”

After losing his job he published his best known work, The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne was stimulated by the book’s reception, and soon thereafter he published two other novels, The House of Seven Gables (1951) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) alongwith A Wonder Book (1859) and Tanglewood Tales, a collection of Greek myths for children which rank high in the canon of juvenile classics. He also published the Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), his friend since his college days. On his inauguration as President in 1853, Pierce named Hawthorne consul at Liverpool, a job he held for four years.

Residence at Concord had led to a close friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. A later stay at Lenox, Massachusetts, brought him into contact with Melville. Hawthorne made such a forceful impression on the writer of the sea stories that Moby Dick (1861) was recast in its present form as a partial consequence of this association and of Melville’s reading of Moses from an Old Manse. The senior writer has acted as a catalyst for the cosmic themes so long held in the mind of Melville. There was deep love and natural admiration between Hawthorne and Melville. The latter was so delighted by conversations with him that he wrote lyrically of Hawthorne’s qualities in his “Hawthorne and His Mosses”: “The world is mistaken in this Nathaniel Hawthorne. He himself must have smiled at its absurd misconception of him. He is immeasurably deeper than the plummer of the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man, it is only the heart, you cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it, there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need not ring it, but touch it, and you find it is gold………. Now it is that blankness in Hawthorne of which I have spoken that so fixes and fascinates me. It may be, nevertheless, that is too largely developed in him. Perhaps he does not give us a ray of his light for every shade of his dark. But however this may be, this blackness it is that furnishes the infinite obscure of his background-that background against which Shakespeare plays his-grandest conceits….”

Hawthorne’s reward for the life of Pierce was the consular appointment at Liverpool and Hawthorne did not return to America until 1860. The factual record of this period lies in Our Old House (1863) and the elaborate series of English French and Italian Notebooks. In Liverpool he saw poverty and squalor the like of which was still unknown in his own country. The social inequalities were more distressing to him than the economic.

Hawthorne was not completely at ease in his work, but he carried these obligations conscientiously. After this Hawthorne sojourned for nearly two years in Rome and Florence. These travels supplied him with the materials for The Marble Faun (1860). His frequent visits to the works of art made him more fastidious yet more sensible of beauty where he saw none before. Time and again he went to see Beatrice Cenci, which he called “the most profoundly wrought picture in the world.” Among works of sculpture the Venus de Midici perhaps interested him most. As Hawthorne said in one of his Notebooks, “The Venus is one of the things, the charm of which does not diminish on better acquaintance. I do not and cannot think of her as a senseless image, but as a being that lives to gladden the world, incapable of decay and death; as young and fair today, as she was three thousand years ago, and still to be young and fair as long as beautiful thought shall require physical, embodiment.”

The America to which Hawthorne returned in 1860 was strange and uncongenial to him, and his lack of enthusiasm over the civil was did not help him. As he says, “It will only affect by a horrible convulsion the self-same end that might and would have been brought about by a gradual and peaceful change. Nor am I at all certain that it will affect that end”. As a creative writer, he accomplished little, though he struggled deseperately to write a romance about a bloody footstep, a missing heir and an American claimant to a great English estate. The earliest form of this poetry, “The Ancestral Footstep” is merely an elaborate series of notes which Hawthorne had written in England and abandoned when he went to work on Marble Faun, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret and Septimius Felton (both written between 1861 and 1863), tell each a complete story, though Hawthorne failed to feel sufficiently satisfied with either to put it into final form. Septimius which has an American Revolutionary setting subordinates the other themes to the search for an elixir of life. When he started writing The Dolliver Romance, sustained composition was quite out of question, and only the three chapters printed in the Atlantic during the last year of his life ever got down the paper.

Hawthorne’s health was now permanently shattered. In the Spring of 1864, he died while on a carriage expedition in New Hampshire with his old friend Pierce. Hawthorne was just short of sixty and had merited a reputation which has never ceased growing. In a tribute published in the Atlantic, Holmes said that Hawthorne would “keep his name in remembrance as long as the language in which he shaped his deep imagination is spoken by human lips.” To Lowell, Hawthorne was the “rarest creative imagination—of the century, the rarest in some ideal respects since Shakespeare.”

Although the importance of Hawthorne’s short stories cannot be overlooked, his major achievements are the four Novels-The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun.

The Scarlet Letter which is Hawthorne’s most assured achievement depicts a theme of a sin committed before the story opens and of the unfolding of consequences of that act in the lives of a group of people. It is the story of Hester Prynne who is impulsive and passionate and is convicted of adultery by her fellow citizens in a small seventeenth century New England town. In accordance with the stern Puritan laws she is made to stand on the public scaffold with her illegitimate child and then asked to wear the scarlet letter “A” for the rest of her life. The local clergyman, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, highly respected for his piety, exhorts her to reveal the name of her lover but Hester refuses. Later her husband, who has taken the name of Roger Chillingworth, visits Hester and her child in prison and expresses a confident intention of finding out the man for himself. After her release, Hester takes a cottage on the outskirts of the town and becomes a needle woman. Her child Pearl is strange, and elflike, with a lawless energy. By brave submission of her fate, Hester has won the respect of the entire community. She is hard working, charitable and in times of illness, a self appointed sister of Mercy. Indeed some people say that the ‘A’ on her dress stands for ‘Able’. Ultimately Hester and Dimmesdale recover, confidence in their love and they plan to go away together. Dimmesdale plans to make the forthcoming Election Day sermon the occasion of his departure. In his eloquent address, he publicly acknowledges Hester and Pearl for the first time. As he dies, he bares his bosom to the crowd and people claim to have seen the letter ‘A’ branded on it. Chillingworth dies a year later, leaving his fortunes to Pearl. Pearl goes abroad with her mother and marries a European aristocrat. Hester returns to the town and spends the rest of her time doing charitable work. When she dies the letter ‘A’ is used for her tombstone.

In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne discovered not only a great range, but an every greater depth. The character of Hester Prynne and her lover, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, are the first to step out from the frame of his speculations and become people in their own right

Like The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables shows Hawthorne’s preoccupation with the past, particularly the Puritan heritage of New England, but it speaks more directly to his theme than its predecessor. Hawthorne studies the error of inherited sin in terms of a greed and a pride so devouring in their descent through generations that he Pyncheon finally beings to devour it nonmembers. The House is a family as well as a physical fact and the theme is a curse which carried down through generations. The wrong that the original Colonel Pyncheon did to the revengeful Matthew Maule is visited upon the nineteenth century Judge Pyncheon and his pathetic cousins Hepzibah and Clifford. In leaving the house, Holgrave, the descendent of Maule, finally absolves the now crumbling mansion of its curse, but its life is past. “God”, cried old Maule upon the scaffold, just before he was hanged for witchcraft, pointing his finger at Colonel Pyncheon, his persecutor, “God will give him blood to drink !” and the book was essentially an attempt “to connect by-gone time with the very present that is fitting away from us.”

Most critics have’ agreed that Hawthorne’s grasp of the ideals is sophisticated and that he embodies them successfully in concrete situations. Yet they have found the novel’s conclusion disappointing. “The miraculously happy ending seems like an evasion of complexities that the book itself has raised.” As Henry Hames puts it, “The House of Seven Gables” is a rich delightful imaginative work, larger and more various than its companions ………… but it seems more like a prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself and it is not so rounded and complete as The Scarlet Letter.”

In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne tried coming yet closer to common experience using his own Brook Farm experiences as the setting for a book. Like Blithedale, Brook Farm was an experiment in Utopian living based on progressive, political ideals. Its members first with embryonic forms of socialism, with women’s rights, and with a radical rejections of urban life. One of its leading lights, the feminist Margaret Fuller, obviously provided Hawthorne with the inspiration for his heroine, Zenobia. The novel asserts the irrevocability of man’s connections with sin and guilt. Hawthorne’s characters are trapped in a world of bitter experience that precludes any escape into innocence. In this respect Prescilla’s situation is emblematic. Bithedale, though it seems a refuge, is really powerless to protect her from the dangers represented,’ by the sinister Professor Westerwelt.

From the start, then, the members of the Blithedale community bring with them qualities that erode their idealistic obsessed with his ideas for the reformation of criminals. Zenobia has more than a touch of pride and sensuality. This is neatly epitomized by the exotic flower that she usually wears in her hair. Passion, in fact, proves the most dramatically destructive force. Hollingsworth quickly becomes the centre of an uneasy sexual triangle that finally destroys Zenobia and blasts his own and Priscilla’s life.

The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last completed Romance, was also his longest and the most ambitions. The scene is Italy and the theme once more is the spiritual development through sin and suffering.

The book abounds in set pieces of description dealing with Italian landscape, social customs and the monuments of the Roman past. whereas earlier American novels had dealt almost exclusively with American settings. The Marble Faun is the first novel-to concern itself with America’s effort to come to terms with the old world. We see, for example, Hilda being attracted to Catholicism despite her Puritan upbringing and Kenyan being seduced by the atmosphere of Donatello’s home at Monte Beni. By touching on these subjects Hawthorne is venturing into a territory that later American novelists eagerly explored. Henry James was to take such ‘transtlantic’ themes peculiarly his own. But though the background is very rich, Hawthorne sees Rome as a tourist, sees it, not from the point of view of one reared in its tradition, as he had seen his own New England.

Critics have pointed out that the genius of Hawthorne had its limitations. His range was deep but not wide. Brownell berated Hawthorne for his weakness –in initiative “in a sense he never meant anything. He drifted.” But the first American who dared to devote himself to the life of the imaginative artist did not lack initiative. Hawthorne’s roots went deep into America and his fundamental concern was with great themes ‘of world art.

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