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  • Hawthorne
  • Karen Roggenkamp

This year brings a record low number of scholarly works about Nathaniel Hawthorne, continuing the trend of the past few years. Nevertheless, several intriguing articles add fresh perspectives to Hawthorne studies. One recurring theme is the complex nature of Hawthorne's narrators and the abiding question of where his own voice emerges. Additional articles examine the influences of other 19th-century writers and philosophers as well as the architecture and landscaping of Salem's House of the Seven Gables.

i Tales

Hawthorne's notoriously slippery narrative voice is amplified in Michael Colacurcio's witty "The Teller and the Tale: A Note on Hawthorne's Narrators" (Nathaniel Hawthorne Review [NHR] 45: 99–129). In 1835 publication plans for a collection of tales titled "The Story-Teller" fell into disarray, though the collection was rescued in part with the release of Twice-Told Tales in 1837 and 1842. Unfortunately, as Colacurcio puts it, "the rescue was hardly complete," for it failed to include the "formal and thematic unity" Hawthorne had sought in his original collection, which sought to experiment with "the enforced combination of gothic and domestic sentiment." More fundamentally, the "rescue" effort removed Hawthorne's clever story frames and a "fully characterized" central narrator: a runaway orphan with his own tale to tell. Without his framing presence as a storyteller sharing his tales in various [End Page 25] geographic locations that corresponded with each story's content, the individual stories seem disembodied and divorced from the connective tissue Hawthorne originally intended. Later, during the "Old Manse" period of the early 1840s, Hawthorne continued to flex his experimental muscles by trying on narrative hats in a variety of styles, a journey Colacurcio recounts as he wanders through the tales and observes the narrator continually asking, "Who am I this time?"

Rachel Boccio is also fascinated by narrators in her exploration of 19th-century theories of self-determination and "sovereigntist assumptions" in "Wakefield" ("'What Sort of Man Was Wakefield?': Selfhood and Sovereignty in Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tale," NHR 45: 130–51). Hawthorne's story, originally published in 1835, is rife with "anxieties about the ambiguous nature of selfhood," which Boccio sees played out through tensions between privacy, "viewed through Wakefield's attempt to be alone," and surveillance, evident in the "narrator's penetrating authority." The narrative interaction between privacy and surveillance provokes a meditation on conflicting personality types, from "self-sovereigns" who boast "innate ability, free agency, and determining power," to "non-agential" and essentially "allegorical" characters who are "yoked to social webs and adjusted by outside forces." Posing an opposition between the authoritative romanticism that overrides "Wakefield" and the "liberal fantasy of innate, autonomous self-position," the story probes fundamental questions "about how selves form in relation to society." Boccio delineates this conflict within the context of theories about privacy which were developing at a time when both urbanization and romantic escapism held cultural capital. Compared to the "mesmerizing" and "spellbinding" narrator, the tale's title character is stuck within a self-imposed privacy, and as the narrator relentlessly surveilles him, he appears "flattened, emptied, and regulated," essentially "deadin-life"—a man who strives to enact the role of flaneur but who fails miserably. Meanwhile, the metatextual framing of the tale allows the narrator to "shape" Wakefield through the process of imagining and "observing" him; the narrator is able to determine "what sort of man" Wakefield is and to erect in the process his own "sovereign identity."

Hawthorne's sketch "Chiefly about War Matters" (1862) has puzzled scholars for generations as they have wondered if it might serve "as confirmation of its author's racism" and a "quietist privileging of aesthetics over politics," even though it was published in the pro-North Atlantic Monthly. Zachary Williams revisits this controversial piece in "Slowing [End Page 26] Down the War: The Sauntering Gaze of Hawthorne's Peaceable Man" (NHR 45: 152–70). Williams disrupts the tendency for readers to see the work as "autobiographical nonfiction" rather than as a fully literary construct featuring "narration by the irreverent persona" identified only as "a Peaceable Man." Placed within the conventions of the literary sketch as Washington Irving understood it, complete with...

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