Hawthorne

Several publications this year bring Nathaniel Hawthorne into conversation with the arts; painting, sculpture, sketching, and artisanal crafts all provide fresh inroads into his fiction and nonfiction alike. Other books and essays enlarge the story of Hawthorne’s critical reception in the United States and abroad, as well as his engagement with the nationalistic, social, and philosophical concerns of the 19th century. Sophia Hawthorne and Julian Hawthorne also find their due in this year’s publications and enrich a portrait of the author in his familial context.

i General

In what may be the first extended effort to construct a picture of Hawthorne’s earliest critical reception in France, The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Monsieur de l’Aubepine and His Second Empire Critics (Ohio State), Michael Anesko and N. Christine Brookes reprint six essays originally published in French periodicals between 1852 and 1864 and never before translated into English. Anesko and Brookes provide useful extended introductions to the collection’s selections, and the essays themselves, as Anesko and Brookes rightly note, yield “a remarkable body of insights” and enable a compelling account of “transatlantic cultural exchange” in 19th-century literature. The French critics whose work is reproduced here include Paul Émile-Daurand Forgues, who had introduced Edgar Allan Poe to French audiences in 1846, Émile Montégut, and Louis Etienne. For the French, Hawthorne’s fiction challenged the pronouncements advanced by Alexis de Tocqueville as he contemplated the American character and its low potential for creative output. But the French critics also maintained a distinctly francophone sensibility in their interpretations, and some of their reactions speak particularly to their nation’s “disappointing experiments with republican institutions.” Anesko and Brookes also consider the French essays in relation to Henry James’s 1879 biography of Hawthorne, much of which was drawn closely from Montégut’s work. In a masterfully suggestive sentence, they dryly remark that in “composing his critical biography, Henry James was, if not an outright plagiarist, then at the least a transparently deceptive appropriator of another distinguished critic’s work.” The similarities between James’s biography and Montégut’s writing—and James’s frequent misreading of the Frenchman’s analysis—are striking, and considering James’s foundational biography in this context complicates that text significantly.

Samuel Chase Coale also ponders the problem of critical reception in The Entanglements of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Haunted Minds and Ambiguous Approaches (Camden). Coale charts the essential trajectory of Hawthorne criticism from the 19th century to the present, spotlighting the central concerns laid out by biographical, psychological, formalist, structuralist, feminist, and New Historicist readings of his work. For Coale, the symbolic touch point of “entanglement” (a term he borrows from quantum physics) suggests the “web of interactions” woven between seemingly divergent critical perspectives.

Deanna Fernie’s ambitiously cross-disciplinary Hawthorne, Sculpture, and the Question of American Art (Ashgate) revels in the interplay of sculptural arts and 19th-century literature, particularly as enacted in Hawthorne’s notebooks, sketches, stories, and novels. The “contemplation of sculpture,” whether complete or fragmentary, becomes a mechanism by which Hawthorne can “reflect on his own art” and “shape the distinctive form of literary Romance that would define him as an American writer.” Fernie depicts Hawthorne as a writer who, throughout his career, drew inspiration from and placed literary emphasis on plastic arts in all of its manifestations—from tombstone engraving and other artisanal crafts to fully realized classical marble sculptures. Writing and sculpture engage in a kind of competition or paragone as Hawthorne considers “the limits and potential of the written word” throughout his career. Thus in works as diverse as “Chippings with a Chisel,” “The Christmas Banquet,” “The Great Stone Face,” and The Marble Faun plastic arts emerge as a “silent form” that might express something “more than words,” even as words are, themselves, somehow “deeper,” more flexible, and more “layered” than sculpture. Fernie speculates that Hawthorne with his “penchant for allegory” must have been naturally attracted to completed, classical sculpture and its parallel “attempt to embody abstract concepts.” Yet ruins and fragments of sculpture figure even more prominently in his fiction, suggesting “a writer in the act of...