Nathaniel Hawthorne

This year occasioned an increase in the number of essays and monographs published about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Biographical investigations take center stage, with a monograph by Robert Milder—which he classifies more specifically as a “literary life” story—alongside essays about Henry James as one of the early biographers of Hawthorne. Additionally, a special issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review revels in the intersections between the author’s humor and his storytelling in multiple contexts.

i General

The most substantial contribution to Hawthorne scholarship this year was Milder’s lyrical Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life (Oxford), which reads in the American author’s biography and writing a constant sense of doubling. Milder registers “two Hawthornes”—the Hawthorne of the public, published fiction, and the Hawthorne of the private, personal notebooks and letters—and he places them into conversation within the pages of this fluid, readable book. The fraternal twins of public and private writing correspond, in this reading, with a Hawthorne dedicated to “romance,” as demonstrated by his fiction, and a Hawthorne dedicated to “realism,” as demonstrated by his notebooks. In turn, the two Hawthornes developed across changing “habitations,” which Milder defines as “geographical places that were the scene and literal or figurative subject of Hawthorne’s writing,” including Salem, Concord, England, and Italy. “Habitation,” however, also suggests “a mental residence, or region of thought,” within which readers find “characteristic attitudes” and “themes”—attitudes and themes that are often at odds when placing Hawthorne’s fiction against his journal writing. As Milder notes, examination of the fiction and the notebooks together suggests that “to pass from life to art … was not simply to assume a different persona” for the author; rather, “it was to take on a different conception of reality.” The central question for Milder is why Hawthorne, as the “realist” he reveals himself to be in his private writings and “in his apprehension of experience,” chose to publish “nonrealistic tales and romances,” even in the face of a literary marketplace that increasingly rejected those forms. Hawthorne’s Habitations seeks in part to answer that central question, and Milder discovers that the author’s “passage” through physical and psychical habitations “came to appear mediated through the tension between romance and realism.” As such, the biographer traces Hawthorne’s life across the four major geographic and psychic locales, crafting a literary life built on close textual reading and provocative psychological interpretation.

In a much briefer biographical work, Milder, writing for the Cambridge Companion to American Novelists, characterizes Hawthorne as the antebellum author who most keenly understood “how individuals are at once timeless in their basic impulses” yet simultaneously “inflected by and enmeshed in history, often tragically.”

Samuel Chase Coale echoes the idea of “habitation” in “Mapping the Manse and Resuscitating Rome: Hawthorne’s Themed Spaces and Staging Places” (NHR 39, i: 57–72), foregrounding how the author’s “historical sense permeates all his landscapes and staged places” and noting how the “staging process provides” entrance “into Hawthorne’s art and the structure of romance as he defined it.” The apparent binaries that dominate Hawthorne’s writing—embodied, for instance, in “the innocent/ignorant young man with his either/or perspective”—are ultimately deconstructed as the author places his characters “in threatening and ambiguous spaces,” or “themed spaces.” He “creates mysterious spaces, staging particular places” like eerie forests and moonlit streets, in order to “dismantl[e] the rigid dualisms of his males” and refigure them “to fit his own disturbing sense of mystery and self-doubt.”

As in recent years, scholars continue to explore Henry James’s 1879 biography, Hawthorne. In “The Anxiety of Audience: Economies of Readership in James’s Hawthorne” (HJR 34, i: 1–15) Gordon Fraser critiques the familiar argument that James attempted to sully his predecessor’s reputation in order to establish his own authority and superiority. Fraser concludes that this reading of the biography disregards James’s praise for his literary forebear and his desire to establish “the elder author … as an example—perhaps like James himself—of a writer who partly stands above and apart from his provincial origins.” If James seeks “battle” with Hawthorne...