Sources:
CSU - Stanislaus
Reasons for Hawthorne's Current Popularity
1. One of the most modern of writers, Hawthorne is relevant in
theme and attitude. According to H. H. Waggoner, Hawthorne's attitudes
use irony, ambiguity, and paradox.
2. Hawthorne rounds off the puritan cycle in American writing -
belief in the existence of an active evil (the devil) and in a sense
of determinism (the concept of predestination).
3. Hawthorne's use of psychological analysis (pre-Freudian) is of
interest today.
4. In themes and style, Hawthorne's writings look ahead to Henry
James, William Faulkner, and Robert Penn Warren.
Major Themes in Hawthorne's Fiction
1. Alienation - a character is in a state of isolation because
of self-cause, or societal cause, or a combination of both. (See
Appendix A for more discussion of Themes 1 & 2).
2. Initiation - involves the attempts of an alienated character
to get rid of his isolated condition.
3. Problem of Guilt -a character's sense of guilt forced by the
puritanical heritage or by society; also guilt vs. innocence.
4. Pride - Hawthorne treats pride as evil. He illustrates the following
aspects of pride in various characters: physical pride (Robin),
spiritual pride (Goodman Brown, Ethan Brand), and intellectual pride
(Rappaccini).
5. Puritan New England - used as a background and setting in many
tales.
6. Italian background - especially in The Marble Faun.
7. Allegory - Hawthorne's writing is allegorical, didactic and moralistic.
8. Other themes include individual vs. society, self-fulfillment
vs. accommodation or frustration, hypocrisy vs. integrity, love
vs. hate, exploitation vs. hurting, and fate vs. free will.
Influences on Hawthorne
1. Salem - early childhood, later work at the Custom House.
2. Puritan family background - one of his forefathers was Judge
Hathorne, who presided over the Salem witchcraft trials, 1692.
3. Belief in the existence of the devil.
4. Belief in determinism.
Hawthorne as a Literary Artist
1. First professional writer - college educated, familiar with
the great European writers, and influenced by puritan writers like
Cotton Mather.
2. Hawthorne displayed a love for allegory and symbol. He dealt
with tensions involving: light versus dark; warmth versus cold;
faith versus doubt; heart versus mind; internal versus external
worlds.
3. His writing is representative of 19th century, and, thus, in
the mainstream due to his use of nature, its primitiveness, and
as a source of inspiration; also in his use of the exotic, the gothic,
and the antiquarian.
The Novel versus the Romance
According to Stanley Bank, Hawthorne may stand as the symbol
of the 19thc. American author and his predicament. Europe could
afford the luxury of romanticizing its past and finding its ideal
in the pastoral. But America's past was too close. Yet America's
literature was in need of tradition in which literature could
flourish. Hawthorne struggled with the problem of relevance of
the artist to the world and the meaning of art to America. The
American Romanticists created a form that, at first glance, seems
ancient and traditional; they borrowed from classical romance,
adapted pastoral themes, and incorporated Gothic elements. Was
there anything unique about the American shape of prose fiction,
or was it merely an amalgam of long and fixed genres? It can be
shown that romance, as practiced in America, was a departure from
each of the genres, although related to them. Gilbert Highet,
in The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western
Literature lists the main elements of classical romance: 1. separated
lovers who remain true to each other, while the woman's chastity
is preserved; 2. an intricate plot, including stories within stories;
3. exciting and unexpected chance events; 4. travel to faraway
settings; 5. hidden and mistaken identity; and 6. written in an
elaborate and elegant style. Classical romance, Highet noted,
is "escape" literature; American romance brings the
reader closer to truth, not further from it. The pastoral is a
literary form in which happy country life is portrayed as a contrast
to the complexity and anxiety of the urban society. Such a contrast
may be seen in the American romancers' use of the frontier, Indian
society, Arcadian communities, Puritan villages, and shipboard
societies. Few of the characters are strictly outside the urban
society to which they provide contrast. It is clearly related
to Hawthorne's creation of "a theater, a little removed from
the highway of ordinary travel, where the creatures of his brain
may play their phantasmagoric antics, without exposing them to
too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives,"
and to his calling for a "license with regard to everyday
probability." But if the American romancer created arcadias,
they are arcadias that invite criticism and redirected that criticism
to the society in which the American romancers lived. Many gothicisms
have been incorporated into American romances. Typical are the
manuscript, the castle, the crime, religion, deformity, ghosts,
magic, blood, etc. In the gothic novel these characteristics are
used as the basis and end of a tale of terror. In the work of
American romancers, they are used not as the object itself, but
to serve the work.
"I have sometimes produced a singular and not unpleasing
effect, so far as my own mind was concerned, by imagining a train
of incidents in which the spirit and mechanism of the fairyland
should be combined with the characters and manners of familiar
life." - N. Hawthorne
"When a writer calls his work a romance, he wishes to claim
a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which
he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed
to be writing a novel." - N. Hawthorne
"The word 'romance' must signify, besides the more obvious
qualities of the picturesque and the heroic, an assumed freedom
from the ordinary novelistic requirements of verisimilitude, development
and continuity; a tendency towards melodrama and idyll; a more
or less formal abstractness and, on the other hand, a tendency
to plunge into the underside of consciousness; a willingness to
abandon moral questions or to ignore the spectacle of man in society,
or to consider these things only indirectly or abstractly."
- Richard Chase
(from Stanley Bank, ed. American Romanticism: A
Shape for Fiction, 1969)
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