Let me confess at the outset: I remain a little ashamed of having chosen for this paper the most aggressively correct title my material could conscientiously justify. And that for a captive audience— whose presence at an anniversary occasion surely signals a dedication to the life and works of Nathaniel Hawthorne that can survive ever so many discoveries of an ingrained resistance to the sacred causes of the modern academy. Of which there may be more than just one.

An ambivalent feminist at best, Hawthorne deeply sympathizes with the travails of Hester and Zenobia, but he does damn the mob of the “scribbling” female competitors he recognized as early as his sketch of “Mrs. Hutchinson”; and he did not wish his daughter to become a writer. He allows the traduction of his fair Priscilla to remind the suspicious reader of a certain class of fugitive slave transactions, but he defended the compromising policies of Franklin Pierce and, when the push of theory came to the shove of war, he seemed more concerned about the fate of poor southern whites than about the enslaved blacks. And, in the matter closest to hand, he did far less with the American Encounter than with the other subjects singled out— by Rufus Choate and others— for treatment in the project of building up a respectable American literature out of authentic American materials.

“Hannah Duston” will scarcely help the cause; and though “Roger Malvin's Burial” can certainly be read in this important canonic sub-category, the thematic significance of “Lovell's Fight” was for a long time easy to miss. There, in the best case, the interest of the Native Americans had figured as a narrative pretext; and elsewhere, as in The Scarlet Letter, their presence can seem something of an historical prop. The itinerant “Story-Teller” probably overstated his creator's case in confessing that he did “abhor an Indian story,” but there seems not much injustice in agreeing that Hawthorne's historical imagination was never altogether energized by “the matter of the Indians.” Puritanism almost everywhere, by cultural necessity if not by familiar bias; and Revolution too, much more than we often recognize; but the aboriginal aspect and cultural significance of America's Red Men, not so much.