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“The Hall of Fantasy” and the Early Hawthorne-Thoreau Relationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Buford Jones
Buford Jones*
Affiliation:
Duke University, Durham, N. C.
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Abstract

The two versions of “The Hall of Fantasy” reveal that the intellectual exchange between Hawthorne and Thoreau at the beginning of the Old Manse period was far more extensive and formative than has hitherto been supposed. The narrator's companion-guide is a strikingly full, thinly disguised fictional portrait of Thoreau as he appeared to Hawthorne in August and September 1842, when their friendship first developed. This portrait provides a new set of insights into their relationship and a more accurate notion of their attitudes toward Emerson, Alcott, and the whole intellectual ferment around Concord. The narrator and his guide assume the precise moral stances of Hawthorne and Thoreau concerning Transcendentalism, technical progress, reform movements, vegetarianism, “Adamism,” and other prominent philosophical and social issues. These discussions largely determined the subjects each would write about for the next year, especially in Hawthorne's “The Old Manse,” “The New Adam and Eve,” and “Earth's Holocaust,” and in Thoreau's two contributions to The Democratic Review. “The Landlord” and “Paradise (to be) Regained.” Their influence can still be seen in the major works of the late 1840's and early 1850's: “The Custom House,” The Bouse of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and the different versions of Walden.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 5 , October 1968 , pp. 1429 - 1438
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1. The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, Conn., 1932), pp. 145, l66-log, 175–177, 180, 182; The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Walden Edition, eds. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Boston and New York, 1906), i; The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, eds. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York, 1958), pp. 76, 77, 118, 124,130.

2. See especially R. H. Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne (Boston and New York, 1897), p. 53; Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven, 1948), pp. 64, 65, 66, 73; Hubert H. Hoeltje, Inward Sky: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Durham, N. C, 1962), pp. 208–213; W. E. Channing, Thoreau, The Poet-Naturalist (Boston, 1902), pp. 273–274; and Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York, 1965), pp. 137–142.

3. “The Old Manse,” in The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. George P. Lathrop (Boston, 1882), n, 19, 33, 41–43; “The Custom House,” in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus, Ohio, 1962), i, 25.

4. American Notebooks, pp. 167, 175.

5. “Thoreau's Contributions to Hawthorne's Mosses,” NEQ, xx (Dec. 1947), 535–542.

6. Edward G. Sampson, “Three Unpublished Letters by Hawthorne to Epes Sargent,” AL, xxxiv (1962), 102–103. George Monteiro has pointed out (AL, xxxvi, Nov. 1964, 346) that this letter appeared in a somewhat altered form in Harper's Weekly, xxiii (1 Nov. 1879), 863.

7. Elizabeth Lathrop Chandler, “A Study of the Sources of the Tales and Romances Written By Nathaniel Hawthorne Before 1853,” in Smith Coll. Studies in Modem Langs., vii. (July 1926), 61.

8. “Hawthorne Surveys His Contemporaries,” AL, xii (May 1940), 228.

9. “The Hall of Fantasy,” in The Pioneer. A Literary and Critical Magazine, eds. J. R. Lowell and R. Carter, i (Feb. 1843), 53.

10. Hubert H. Hoeltje, Sheltering Tree: A Story of the Friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Amos Bronson Alcott (Durham, N. C, 1943), p. 55.

11. At this time the first category would include Bronson Alcott, Washington AUston, W. C. Bryant, Robert Collyer, J. F. Cooper, R. H. Dana, Sr., Professor Espy, Abigail Fol-som, Rufus Griswold, Fitz-Greene Halleck, O. W. Holmes, Washington Irving, Father Miller, John Neal, James Gates Percival, John Pierpont, E. A. Poe, Epes Sargent, Catherine Sedgwick, Charles Sprague, H. T. Tuckerman, and N. P. Willis; the second category would include Orestes Brownson, R. W. Emerson, J. R. Lowell, Charles Newcomb, and Jones Very; and the third George S. Hillard, H. W. Longfellow, John O'Sullivan, and perhaps some of the unnamed Brook Farmers.

12. See Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, 1895), I, 221.

13. American Notebooks, p. 168. Tuckerman, according to F. L. Mott, became editor of the Boston Miscellany “at the end of 1842” (A History of American Magazines: 1741–1850, New York, 1930, p. 718). Presumably his editorship began after Channing's visit to Hawthorne but before 21 Oct. when “The Hall of Fantasy” was completed.

14. This statement should be compared with Hawthorne's and Emerson's conversation at the Old Manse on 8 April 1843, when Thoreau was preparing to leave for Staten Island: “Mr. Thoreau was discussed and his approaching departure; in respect to which we agreed pretty well; but Mr. Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an inmate. It may be that such a sturdy and uncompromising person is fitter to meet occasionally in the open air, than to have as a permanent guest at table and fireside” (American Notebooks, p. 176).

15. Harding, Days of Thoreau, p. 65.

16. Harding, p. 125.

17. See the full and informative biography by Odell Shepard, Pedlars' Progress: The Life of Branson Alcolt (Boston, 1937), especially the chapter entitled “Paradise Planter [1842–1843],” pp. 343–380.

18. See Thoreau, Correspondence, p. 90; American Notebooks, pp. 175, 177.

19. Shepard, Pedlar's Progress, p. 354.

20. Shepard, pp. 343–380.

21. “Transcendental Grocery Bills: Thoreau's Wolden and Some Aspects oi American Vegetarianism,” Univ. of Texas Studies in English, xxxvr (1957), 141–154.

22. Hawthorne seems to have come closest to some vegetarian sentiments during his association with Thoreau. In a notebook entry for 18 Sept. 1842 he recounted a short fishing excursion on the Concord River in his boat (formerly Thoreau's “Musketaquid”) : “I suffered the boat to float almost at its own will down the stream, and caught fish enough for this morning's breakfast. But, partly from a qualm of conscience, and partly, I believe, because I eschewed the trouble of cleaning them, I finally put them all into the water again, and saw them swim away as if nothing had happened.” Compare Ch. xi, “Higher Laws,” of Walden: “I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect… . when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. … A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.”

On 7 April 1843 Hawthorne made a “Pythagorean vow” of silence during his wife's absence. This was also the day he began reading the current issue of the Dial, containing Lane's article on Alcott, and, presumably breaking his vow, conversed with Thoreau “upon the Dial, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated subjects.” Thoreau speaks of Pythagorean dietary restrictions in “The Bean-Field.”

23. Orestes A. Brownson, “Two Articles from the Princeton Review,” in The Boston Quarterly Review, iii (July 1840), 265–323. For a general account of Brownson's attitude toward Alcott, see Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), passim.

24. See J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden with the Text of the First Version (Chicago, 1957).

25. Correspondence, p. 85.

26. Correspondence, p. 77.

27. Cf. Walien (Ch. ii): “Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainment.”

28. See, e.g., Frank Davidson, “Thoreau's Contributions to Hawthorne's Mosses,” p. 539; and R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), pp. 14–15.

29. Miller has noted that the sketch of Emerson in Mosses may have been substituted for the material omitted from the revised “Hall of Fantasy” (“Hawthorne Surveys His Contemporaries,” p. 231).