Hawthorne

More good work advanced Nathaniel Hawthorne studies this year. Hawthorne and Herman Melville continue to be a productive pairing in a valuable collection edited by Jana L. Argersinger and Leland S. Person on the relationship between the authors and in a book by Peter West on the influence of the rise of information culture. Notable books also appeared from Larry J. Reynolds, Roberta Weldon, and Laurence Raw, as well as engaging essays from, among others, Michael J. Colacurcio, Laura Doyle, Michael Anesko, and Monika Elbert.

i General

Larry J. Reynolds's Devils and Rebels: The Making of Hawthorne's Damned Politics (Michigan) explores how the author's system of beliefs affected his political perspectives on such issues as slavery and abolition. To Reynolds Hawthorne's political thinking depends upon "two major psychohistorical images—revolution and witchcraft—which were racialized for him and many Americans by their associations with interracial wars and insurrections." The images Hawthorne sought and employed in his writings were used to illustrate his belief that vast human efforts never go as planned, and that unintended pain and suffering are always by-products of efforts to do good. Reynolds's book traces the origins and complexity of Hawthorne's political perspective, then suggests how this perspective influenced his artistic production. The book's introduction recommends a historicist approach as a way to more thoughtfully read what has often been a hostile treatment of Hawthorne's politics, then interestingly proceeds to suggest that "a Christian pacifism, not unlike that of the Quakers, serves as the foundation of his politics, which, though characterized as thoughtless and benighted, actually possesses a depth and subtlety comparable to those of his literary works themselves."

Reynolds's first chapter, "Revolution and Warfare," looks at Hawthorne's early career and pacifism in the context of political and social turmoil, including the mounting anxiety over antislavery efforts caused by the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1803. Chapter 2, "Witchcraft and Abolitionism," traces Hawthorne's linking of Salem witch-hunters with radical abolitionists. Chapter 3, "Racism, Slave Narratives, and the Body as Evidence," looks at Hawthorne's racism as compared with his contemporaries' and posits spectral evidence and gothic sensationalism as influential in Hawthorne's distrust of the accounts of abolitionists and fugitive slaves. Chapter 4, "Accord in Concord," focuses on the author's politics in the context of his transcendentalist neighbors. Chapter 5, "Lies, Specters, and the 'Black Man,'" reads The Scarlet Letter as cautionary ghost story and The House of the Seven Gables as "a tale of revenge directed at the obtuse and gullible as well as the politically corrupt." Chapter 6, "Transformative Violence at Home and Abroad," examines the author's reaction to violence in the 1850s in part by comparing the behavior and values of Franklin Pierce with those of Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance. Chapter 7, "The Stationary 'Fall' of a Public Intellectual," asserts what Reynolds sees as Hawthorne's alternative vision of society even in the face of the mounting pressures of the Civil War and the attendant challenge to Hawthorne's steadfast politics and pacifism.

In Hawthorne, Gender, and Death: Christianity and Its Discontents (Palgrave), Roberta Weldon employs a spread of intersecting methodologies—psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural anthropology, feminist theory—in her investigation of Hawthorne's representations of characters processing or denying death. Proceeding from the assumption that death is the organizing principle of society, Weldon's study is an interesting literary corollary to Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf), which also appeared this year. Weldon argues that Hawthorne's literary imagining of death and dying—Dimmesdale's death, the drowned Zenobia, Judge Pyncheon's dead body—"invites reassessment of nineteenth-century New England's consolations of dying and exposes their contradictions and their failings." She asks, "Why did Nathaniel Hawthorne in his fictions need femininity to be associated with death?" and ultimately concentrates not simply on representations of death and dying but also on how "consolations of dying reflect imperatives of the living and have significant ethical and moral implications."

Weldon's Chapter 1, "Unholy Dying in The...