Hawthorne and the Problem of New England

Regions are not only concrete geographic domains but also conceptual places.

Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England

Responding in 1957 to a question about his fictional subject, William Faulkner insisted that he did not write about the South and southern civilization save as they constituted the particular "country" that he knew; his interest was "the human heart" (10). Hawthorne spoke similarly when he described himself as "burrowing . . . into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance" (XI: 4).¹ Faulkner and Hawthorne did write about their regions, past and present, explicitly and on levels available to conscious control, but they also wrote from their regions insofar as their notions of "the heart" were inflected by their personal and cultural relationship to a distinctively local world and by the sense of life they introjected, half-unconsciously, from its ethos.

Some writers (Melville, for one) are imaginable apart from their birthplace and authorial homes; Hawthorne is not. Over the course of his career, Hawthorne had four major "habitations" that were the scene and literal or figurative subject of his writing: Salem, MA, his ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, MA, where he lived from 1842 to 1845 (and again in 1852-53 and after 1860) and came into contact with the Adamic spirit of the American Renaissance; England, where he served as consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857, and where he felt himself more "surrounded by materialisms, and hemmed in with the grossness of this earthly life, than anywhere else" in his experience (XXII: 433); and Italy, where he resided through most of 1858-59, drafted The Marble Faun (1860), and was challenged, like James's Americans abroad, by the obliquities of an older, denser civilization morally as well as culturally at variance with his own. Beyond geographical localities, "habitations" thus imply mental residences, or regions of thought and sensibility associated with place but not narrowly co-extensive with it and having their own distinctive attitudes, colorations, and constellation of themes. Of these habitations, New England, or "Salem," has priority not simply because it was the first but because, like Faulkner's South, it was the lens through which he processed all the others. In this respect, Hawthorne never left "Salem" or divested himself of his identity-shaping ambivalence toward New England.

Toward the end of "The Custom-House" Hawthorne wrote with wishful finality of Salem, "Henceforth, it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else" (I: 4). He had previously tried to sever his roots in Salem, settling in Concord's Old Manse in July 1842 and reinventing himself as writer and man in the three years that followed. In the fall of 1845 life returned him to Salem like a "bad half-penny," as he put it (II: 12), and it was in Salem, after his mother's death nearly four years later, that he wrote The Scarlet Letter (1850). The ending of "The Custom-House" was intended as a farewell to Salem not only as a residence but as a mental "habitation" associated with an identity (the lonely recluse of the Twice-Told Tales period) and a literary practice. But the bad penny returned, inwardly at least, once more. Even in self-exile in the distant Berkshires, Salem remained for Hawthorne both a weight and a gravitational pull. "Mr. Hawthorne thinks it is Salem which he is dragging at his ankles still," his wife reported of his gloomy spirits on 1 August 1850, more than two months after the move to Lenox (qtd in Wineapple 220). By early September Hawthorne had begun The House of the Seven Gables (1851), his Salem book, which also ends with a decisive break from the town. Salem had imprinted itself on Hawthorne in ways that physical separation alone could not erase. His first exorcism in "The Custom-House" had been incomplete; the ritual had to be performed again.

I use "Salem" as synecdochical for "New England" because in Hawthorne's imagination it largely was, despite his broad acquaintance with the region. As a boy, Hawthorne had...