Hawthorne’s English Material: The Civil War in Our Old Home

Our Old Home extends Hawthorne’s early skepticism and resistance to rigidity in context of and registering a deep anxiety about the Civil War and its destruction. Through its well-remarked division of the material and the ideal along nationalistic lines, whereby all that is English is flesh and blood and all that is American is abstract and theoretic, the volume engages and ultimately critiques the too rigid adherence to principle that Hawthorne reads in the “patriotic” enthusiasm of his contemporaries. The war looms for Hawthorne as an apocalyptic force, sustained by uncompromised ideals, and Hawthorne addresses it on a philosophical level in Our Old Home.