Hawthorne

The highlight of this year's work in Hawthorne studies—the highlight, in fact, of the 21st century so far—was Brenda Wineapple's much anticipated critical biography. Wineapple's biography overshadowed all other work on Hawthorne in 2003, yet the year was also notable for lively challenges by Todd Onderdonk and Angela Mills to those who would view Hawthorne as sympathetic toward his strong, independent women characters; for Peter Bellis's analysis of the link between the aesthetic and the political; and for several fresh readings of the tales.

i Bibliography and Biography

NHR has long provided Hawthorne scholars with an annual annotated bibliography of books and essays as well as a comprehensive list of bibliographies, dissertations, and new editions on Hawthorne. Megan L. Swihart's "Current Bibliography" (29, ii: 84–118) continues that fine tradition. She lists items as old as 1999 and as recent as 2003. Her annotations are precise, thorough, and highly useful.

Wineapple's brilliant critical biography, Hawthorne: A Life (Knopf), is the first comprehensive biography since Edwin Haviland Miller's Salem Is My Dwelling Place: A Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (see AmLS 1991, pp. 20–21) and the best since Arlin Turner's Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (AmLS 1980, p. 24) and James R. Mellow's Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Time (AmLS 1980, pp. 24–25). Wineapple's scholarly biography is likely to appeal to a much broader audience than is customary for academic biographies. Thoroughly grounded in a wealth of archival and primary sources (its most original distinction in this regard being its use of Hawthorne family letters in the possession of Evelyn Hamby and now in the collections of Stanford University), Wineapple's Hawthorne will rival Mellow's as the standard scholarly biography. Unlike so many academic biographers, Wineapple constructs a well-paced narrative, achieves immediacy by allowing the participants to tell their own stories through ample use of quotations, and in general writes with what can only be called "attitude." Always interesting, Wineapple is never less than stylish in her close attention to diction and tone, and the tone more often than not is ironic—sometimes sassy, occasionally sarcastic, even at times flippant. Rather than offering a lengthy disquisition on why Hawthorne could not have been exactly serious in his elevation of Hilda at the closing of The Marble Faun, for instance, Wineapple ends a paragraph by quoting the closing sentence ("Hilda had a hopeful soul, and saw sunlight on the mountain-tops") and then begins and ends a new paragraph with this single sentence: "One can almost hear him snicker." As frustrated as were most of Hawthorne's in-laws and acquaintances with Hawthorne's stubborn, absolute loyalty to the person and the disastrous politics of his lifelong friend Franklin Pierce, Wineapple at one point concludes in refreshingly candid exasperation, "Probably not even Pierce's wife loved him as Hawthorne did."

As bold as Wineapple can be stylistically, she clearly seeks to provide a more moderate and restrained account of Hawthorne's life than that provided in the heavily speculative psychological analyses of her most recent predecessors: Miller, T. Walter Herbert (see AmLS 1993, pp. 23–24), and, from the perspective no doubt of some critics, me (AmLS 1998, pp. 31–33). Wineapple's Hawthorne, for instance, did not leave Lenox in homophobic flight from Melville and his attraction to him, as Miller essentially suggests; he left because as an adult he had a restless inability to feel at home anywhere for long and because he sought to be as near to the political action as possible in the presidential elections of 1852. As this example suggests, Wineapple attempts whenever possible to balance the psychological explanation with the practical, as though she too is seeking the infamously elusive Hawthorne in some neutral territory between the Imaginary and the Actual. In the end, Wineapple seems to find her frustrating quest to give her subject solidity (the inevitable burden of all Hawthorne biographers) as something of a key to his character itself, for it parallels Hawthorne's own disquieting sense of his insubstantiality and his own lifelong efforts to define himself. In the closing...