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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Any study of Hawthorne's villains seems to demand first of all an examination of the word “villain” lest the category become as unwieldy as that group in Hawthorne's “The Procession of Life” who ranked themselves in “the brotherhood of crime.” When a term becomes all-inclusive, it is no longer useful, and since almost all of Hawthorne's tales and romances show a concern for sin and evil, there is a temptation to call all of his sinners, as well as all of those whose lives or actions bring some harm to others, villains. But this is a distortion since the word is defined simply as a person of depraved and malevolent character devoted to base or evil acts, one who deliberately plots and does serious harm to others.
1 “The Villains in the Major Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James” (Wisconsin, 1959), Dissertation Abstracts, xix, 2939.
2 James E. Miller, Jr., “Hawthorne and Melville: The Unpardonable Sin,” PMLA, LXX (March 1955), 91.
3 Citations from most of the tales and romances in my text follow The Complete Novels and Selected Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson (New York, 1937), but page references are not indicated.
4 Classifying or separating the characters into groups maybe, in the opinion of some, an unhappy device for what I am attempting here. However, every device has its disadvantages, and this one seems to have fewer than others when it is remembered that the attempt is to show how much, or how little, of the four-part definition of a villain—one who (deliberately) (plots or does) (serious harm) (to others)—is applicable in each case.
5 Judge Pyncheon will be referred to again in the last section of the paper where I use him as a contrast to Chilling-worth to illustrate Hawthorne's technical achievement in his villains.
6 For a complete discussion of this subject, see Joseph M. Schwartz, “Nathaniel Hawthorne and Freedom of the Will” (unpubl. diss., Wisconsin, 1952) or a summary of its chief ideas in his “God and Man in New England,” in Harold C. Gardiner, ed., American Classics Reconsidered: A Christian Appraisal (New York, 1958).