Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T19:04:08.004Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2012

Timothy Parrish
Affiliation:
Florida State University
Get access

Summary

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64) is at the very center of the American novel tradition, not only because so many students read The Scarlet Letter (1850) in high school or college, but also because the issues the book raises – sex and religion, liberation versus repression, gender and the position of women, the nature of the human personality and the prospects for remaking the social order – are enduringly part of American culture. Hawthorne’s special insight, like Faulkner’s, is his understanding of how individuals are at once timeless in their basic impulses and inflected by and enmeshed in history, often tragically. We must read him with something of this same understanding. Hawthorne is different from us, a man of the mid–nineteenth century even when he writes of the mid–seventeenth, and he is also like us, addressing versions of the conflict between the “I want” and the “thou shalt” (social, moral, religious, psychological) that besets people in all ages and cultures.

Hawthorne came to the novel late, at forty-five, in what might be called the third phase of his career. The first phase was the period of near-seclusion he spent mainly in his family house in Salem between his graduation from Bowdoin College in 1825 and the publication of Twice-Told Tales in 1837, years in which he wrote and anonymously published many of his best and nearly all of his darkest tales. The second phase began with his marriage to Sophia Peabody in July 1842 and their settling at the Old Manse in transcendental Concord, and it extended through the fall of 1845 when a combination of events returned Hawthorne to Salem and presently installed him as surveyor of customs in the Salem Custom House.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baym, Nina, The Shape of Hawthorne’s CareerIthaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Bell, Michael Davit, The Development of American Romance, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980.Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Office of the Scarlet Letter, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Brodhead, Richard H.Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976.Google Scholar
Brodhead, Richard H., The School of Hawthorne, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Budick, Emily Miller, Engendering Romance: American Women Writes and the Hawthorne Tradition, New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Frederic I., “Scarlet A Minus,” College English, 5 (1944): 173–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crews, Frederick, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, 1966; rpt. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989. New York, Oxford University Press, 1966.Google Scholar
James, Henry, Hawthorne, 1879; rpt. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1956.
Long, Robert Emmet, The Great Succession: Henry James and the Legacy of Hawthorne, Pittsburgh, Pa., University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Matthiessen, F. O., American Renaissance, New York, Oxford University Press, 1941.Google Scholar
McCall, Dan, Citizens of Somewhere Else: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Mellow, James R., Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1980.Google Scholar
Milder, Robert, Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life, New York, Oxford University Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millington, Richard H., Practicing Romance, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rahv, Philip, “The Dark Lady of Salem,” Image and Idea, New York, New Directions, 1949.Google Scholar
Waggoner, Hyatt H., Hawthorne: A Critical Study, rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1963.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
All citations of Hawthorne’s writings are to the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al., 23 vols (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 1962–93)
Brodhead, Richard H., Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (1929; rpt. New York, Norton, 1962)Google Scholar
James, Henry, Hawthorne (1879; rpt. Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1956)Google Scholar
Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition (London, Chatto and Windus, 1948)Google Scholar
Trilling, Lionel, “Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” The Liberal Imagination (1948; rpt. London, Mercury Books, 1961)Google Scholar
Chase, Richard, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1957)Google Scholar
Porte, Joel, The Romance in America (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1969)Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×