Unraveling Hawthorne: The Tell-Tale Thread of Poe

108 Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism Unraveling Hawthorne: TheTell-TdeThread of Poe Richard Kopley. The Threads of “TheScarlet Letter”: A Study of Hawthorne’s Transfmative Art. Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2003. 201. $42.50 cloth. For Nathaniel Hawthorne, the creation of TheScarb t Lettersignaleda far greater career leap thanjust the embracement of a new form, the long romance . The length of the text gave him opportunity to take stock of his artistic past. Manyplot elements and characterizations in the 1850novel had their origins in two previous decades of tale writing . The protagonists of “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “Egotism; or, The Bosom-Serpent,” and “Ethan Brand found renewed expression in the delineation of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale. Roger Chillingworth’svillainousancestors include Peter Hovenden, Doctor Rappaccini, and the unnamed cynic in “The Great Carbuncle.” And Hawthorne had rehearsed Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne’s forest rendezvous in “The Hollow of the Three Hills”and “YoungGoodman Brown.”The romance, however,not onlysummed up his own career to 1849but also allowed him to integrate elements of fiction composed by peers he admired. Such sources of influence are diffcult to isolate,for Hawthorne’spreference for privacy occasionally matched the zeal that Aylmer displayedin keeping his notebook secret from his wife in “The Birth-Mark.” Of course,such authorially cultivatedmystery invitesscholarlycuriosity,and thus many students of Hawthorne’s oeuvre have devoted themselves over the last century to uncovering these wellsprings of inspiration. An excellent contribution to this tradition is Richard Kopley’s study The Threaakof “TheScarletLetter”:A Study o f Hawthorne? Transformative Art. For Kopley, Hawthorne’s first effort in long fiction demands such scrutiny: “Hawthorneoffers an invitation [tohis reader]. If Hawthorne felt an anxiety of influence, he also knew the allure of revelation” [181. The running metaphor throughout this study borrowsits imagery from Hester Prynne’sabilities as a seamstress: the “threads”are Hawthorne’s sources, which he interweavesinto the fabricof TheScarletL..etter. What sets Kopley’s monograph apart from other efforts resides in the differences in form and in canonical status of the three primary sources he isolates: a well-known tale by a canonical writer-Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-TaleHeart” (1843);an ignored poemby a canonical writer-James RussellLowell’s “Legendof Brittany”(1843);and an ignored novel by a forgotten writer-Ebenezer Wheelwright’s Salem Belle: A Tab of 1692 (1842). Thejuxtaposition of three such disparate sources revealsjust how comprehensive and attentive Hawthorne was to his American contemporaries. Among other original effects, Kopley’s implied thesis that Hawthorne read Wheelwrightjust as carefully as he did Poe forced me to reconsider my academic tendency to think only within canonical continuities . Readers of thisjournal will be very pleased with Kopley’s treatment of Poe’s impact on The Scarlet Letter. Since the 1960s,most scholarlystudies have concentrated on the reverse situationPoe ’s awareness of, reaction to, and use of Hawthorne ’s tales, an excellent example being Robert Regan’s “Hawthorne’s ‘Plagiary’;Poe’s Duplicity” [Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25 (December 1970): 281-981. [I myself have recently speculated on a moment in this relationship; see “Poe’s‘Life’and Hawthorne’s ‘Death’:ALiteraryDebate,”Poe Studies /Dark Romanticism 35 (2002): 31-37.] In his essay , Regan concedes that most arguments of this sort must be circumstantial. Seldom do writers bequeath the critics who study them a “smokinggun ”letter orjournal entry to confirm such channels of influence. Hence, the critic’s task is to assemble as many biographical, historical, and textual facts as can be found into a coherent scenario -that is, an argument that arranges such evidence into a plausible reconstruction of a literary -historicalevent. In law,the more extensivethe circumstantialevidence,the likelierthe conviction. In scholarship, the more exhaustive the research, the sounder the argument. By such standards, Kopley’sthesis is compelling. As he does with the Lowell poem and the Wheelwrightnovel,Kopley painstakinglytracesthe multiple paths by which Hawthorne would have 109 encountered“TheTell-TaleHeart,”the mostlikely being the story’s 1843appearance in the Pioneer, which also contained Lowell’s review of Hawthorne ’s Hi.stm‘cd T hfm Youth. The following issue featured “The Hall of Fantasy,”in which Hawthorne registeredmixed praise for Poe. Kop ley speculates that Hawthorne intimately knew three of Poe...