The Anxiety of Audience: Economies of Readership in James’s Hawthorne

The author critiques a widespread psychoanalytic interpretation of James’s Hawthorne (1879), proposing instead an economic model for interpreting the work. After demonstrating that a reading first proposed by Richard H. Brodhead—based on Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence—has become pervasive in James scholarship, the author shows how this model fails to recognize the highly conscious way James used Hawthorne as an address to British readers. The article shows that Hawthorne in fact represents an attempt to undermine British notions of U.S. authorship and produce space in which James could position himself as a cosmopolitan, transatlantic man of letters.