Nathaniel Hawthorne

gigatos | March 18, 2022

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Summary

Nathaniel Hawthorne, born July 4, 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts (United States) and died May 19, 1864 in Plymouth, New Hampshire (United States), is an American writer, author of short stories and novels.

Youth and training

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804. His birthplace has been preserved and is open to the public. William Hathorne, his great-great-great-grandfather, was a Puritan who emigrated from England and settled in Dorchester, before moving to Salem. There he became a prominent member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and held several political offices, as well as magistrate and judge, where he became known for the severity of his judgments. His son, John Hathorne, the author”s great-great-grandfather, was one of the assessors at the Salem witch trials. Following the discovery of this fact, when he was about 20 years old, the author is said to have added a “w” to his name, shortly before graduating from college, in order to disassociate himself from his ancestors. Hawthorne”s father, Nathaniel Hathorne Sr. was a captain in the merchant marine. He died in Suriname of yellow fever in 1808. Afterwards, the young Hawthorne, his mother and two sisters moved in with the Manning”s, their maternal relatives, in Salem, where they lived for ten years. While there, Hawthorne was struck in the leg during a game of bat and ball, and was confined to bed for a year without doctors being able to identify his illness.

In the summer of 1816, the family moved into a boarding house with farmers, before moving to a house built especially for them by their uncles Richard and Robert Manning in Raymond. (This move made him homesick, and he frequently complained about being away from his mother and sisters. Despite his homesickness, in August and September 1820 he amusingly sent home seven copies of The Spectator, a handwritten journal that included essays, poems and short stories marked by the young author”s use of adolescent humor.

Robert Manning had insisted that Hawthorne attend the college, despite the young man”s protests. With the financial support of this uncle, Hawthorne went to Bowdoin College in Brunswick in 1821 because of family ties in that area, but also because of the inexpensive nature of his tuition. On his way to Bowdoin, at the Portland stop, Hawthorne met and became friends with future U.S. President Franklin Pierce. In college, he befriended Henry Longfellow, Jonathan Cilley, and Horatio Bridge. Years after his graduation in 1825, he describes his college experience to Richard Henry Stoddard:

“I was educated (as they say) at Bowdoin College. I was a lazy student, careless of college rules and the Procustesian details of academic life, choosing rather to nurse my own fancy than to dig into Greek roots and be counted among the learned Thebans.”

Debuts

In 1836, Hawthorne became the editor of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. At the same time, he boarded with the poet Thomas Green Fessenden on Hancock Street in Beacon Hill, Boston. He was offered a position as a weigher and measurer at the Boston Custom House at a salary of $1,500 per year, which he accepted on January 17, 1839. During this stay, he rented a room from George Stillman Hillard, Charles Sumner”s financial partner. Hawthorne wrote in the relative obscurity of what he called his “owl”s nest” in the family home. Looking back on this period of his life, he would say: “I did not live but only dreamed life. He published short stories, including Young Goodman Brown and The Minister”s Black Veil, to various magazines and annuals, but none of them really drew attention to the author. Horatio Bridge offered to take a chance on publishing the stories in a collection. Published in the spring of 1837 in one volume, under the title Twice-Told Tales, this book brought Hawthorne local fame.

Marriage and family

In Bowdoin”s day, Hawthorne bet his friend Jonathan Cilley a bottle of Madeira that Cilley would be married before him. In 1836, he won the bet, but he did not remain a bachelor all his life. After romances with local women, including Mary Silsbee and Elizabeth Peabody, he began writing to the latter”s sister, the illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. Seeking a possible home for himself and Sophia, he joined the utopian community of Brook Farm in 1841, not so much out of conviction as to save the money needed to establish his household. He paid a deposit of $1,000 and was given the task of shoveling the mound of manure known as the “gold mine. He ended the experiment the same year, but his adventure at Brook Farm proved to be a source of inspiration for his novel Valjoie.

Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody on July 9, 1842, in a ceremony held in the Peabody parlor on West Street in Boston. The couple moved into “The Old Manse” in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three years in the neighborhood of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson invited him into his social circle, but Hawthorne was a shy man on an almost pathological level and remained silent at gatherings. At the Old Manse, Hawthorne wrote most of the stories collected in Mosses from an Old Manse.

Like her husband, Sophia Peabody is a loner. In her youth, she suffered from frequent migraines and underwent several experimental medical treatments. She remained mostly bedridden until her sister introduced her to Hawthorne. After that, her headaches seemed to subside. This may have been due to a treatment her father prescribed for teething pain, which contained mercury. The Hawthornes had a long and happy marriage. Of his wife, whom he called his “Dove,” Hawthorne wrote that she “is, in the strictest sense of the word, my only companion; and I need no other – there is no room in my mind, nor in my heart…. Thank God that I am enough for his boundless heart! Sophia greatly admired her husband”s work. In one of her journals, she wrote:

“I am always so dazzled and impressed and confounded by the richness, the depth, the…jewels of beauty of his production that I always look forward to a second reading, which will allow me to meditate, to be inspired, and to take in fully the miraculous abundance of thoughts.”

On their first wedding anniversary, poet William Ellery Channing comes to the Old Manse to help them. A local teenager named Martha Hunt drowns in the river, and the Hawthornes” boat, the Pond Lily, is used to try to find her body. Hawthorne assists in the search for the body, describing the experience as “a spectacle of such perfect horror… It was the very picture of agony. The incident later inspired a scene in his novel Valjoie.

Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne had three children. The first, named Una after The Faerie Queene (much to the chagrin of family members), was born on March 3, 1844. Hawthorne wrote to a friend, “I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that arises from the birth of a child…. One cannot escape it any longer. I have business on earth now, and must consider around me the means to achieve it”. In 1846, their son Julian was born. Hawthorne wrote to his sister Louisa on June 22, 1846, among several facts and news: “A little wren made his appearance here ten minutes ago, at six o”clock in the morning, who claimed to be your nephew. Their last child, Rose, was born in May. Hawthorne calls her “my autumnal flower”. Una dies unmarried at thirty-three. Julian moves to the western United States and writes a book about his father.

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Maturity

On April 3, 1846, Hawthorne was officially appointed to the customs office, with the title of “Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly and Inspector of the Revenue for the Port of Salem,” with an annual salary of $1,200. During this period he had difficulty writing, as he himself admitted to Longfellow: “I am in the process of taking up my pen again…. Whenever I sit alone, or walk alone, I find myself dreaming of stories, as I used to; but these mornings in the Custom House undo all that the afternoons and evenings have done. I would be happier if I could write. Like his previous job at the Custom House in Boston, this work is subject to the politics of the spoils system. A Democrat, Hawthorne loses this position on June 8, 1849, with the change of administration in Washington after the 1848 presidential election. Hawthorne wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser, which was attacked by the Whigs and supported by the Democrats, making Hawthorne”s removal from office a particularly discussed event in New England. Hawthorne is deeply affected by the death of his mother, which occurs shortly thereafter, at the end of July, referring to it as “the darkest hour I have ever lived. Hawthorne was finally appointed corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum in 1848. Among the personalities who intervened at this time were Emerson, Thoreau, Louis Agassiz and Theodore Parker.

Hawthorne returned to writing in earnest and published The Scarlet Letter in mid-March 1850, a novel preceded by a preface that referred to his three years at the Custom House and included various allusions to local politicians, who did not appreciate the writer”s treatment of them. One of the first books in America to be mass-produced, the novel sells 2,500 copies in ten days and earns Hawthorne $1,500 in fourteen years. Two competing publishers put out pirate editions in London, and the book immediately became a bestseller in the United States, marking the beginning of the most lucrative period of his writing career. One of Hawthorne”s friends, the critic Edwin Percy Whipple, objected to the novel”s “morbid intensity” and its dense psychological detail, writing that the book “is therefore inclined to become, like Hawthorne, too painfully anatomical in its display of them. In the twentieth century, the writer, D. H. Lawrence will consider, on the contrary, that there could not exist a more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter. The immediate success of The Scarlet Letter allowed Hawthorne to make a living from his pen from 1850.

Hawthorne and his family moved to a small red-painted farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, in late March 1850. Hawthorne befriended Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and Herman Melville, whom he met on August 5, 1850, at a picnic to which the authors had been invited by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Hawthorne”s collection of short stories Mosses from an Old Manse, and his review, entitled Hawthorne and his Mosses, had been printed anonymously in The Literary World on August 17 and 24. Melville, who was then working on the composition of Moby Dick, wrote that these stories revealed a dark side to Hawthorne, “wrapped in darkness, ten times black” and emphasized the quality of the collection. Later, Melville dedicated Moby Dick (1851) to Hawthorne: “As a token of my admiration for his genius, this book is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. The writer Stéphane Lambert relates the passionate friendship between the two men in his book Fraternelle mélancolie.

Hawthorne”s stay in the Berkshire Mountains was very productive for the writer. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) – which the poet and critic James Russell Lowell considered better than The Scarlet Letter and “the most valuable contribution to New England history that has been made” – and Valjoie (1852), his only first-person work, were written there. He also published in 1851 a collection of short stories rewriting myths, The First Book of Wonders, a work he had been thinking of writing since 1846. Nevertheless, the poet William Ellery Channing reported that Hawthorne “suffered greatly from living in these places.” Although the family loved the setting of the Berkshires, Hawthorne did not enjoy the winters in their little red house. They left the place on November 21, 1851. And Hawthorne notes, “I am sick to death of the Berkshires…. I have felt languid and discouraged, during most of my stay.

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The Wayside and stay in Europe

Returning to Concord in 1852, the Hawthornes purchased “The Hillside,” a home previously occupied by Amos Bronson Alcott, in February and renamed it “The Wayside. Among their neighbors were Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. That same year, Hawthorne wrote a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce for his presidential campaign. He described him as “a man of peaceful ends” in The Life of Franklin Pierce. Horace Mann said, “If he makes Pierce look like a great man or a good man, it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote. In the biography, Hawthorne portrays Pierce as a statesman and soldier who did not accomplish great deeds because of his desire to make “little noise” and thus “retired into the background.” It also glosses over the fact that Pierce used to drink, despite rumors of his alcoholism, and emphasizes Pierce”s belief that slavery could “not be solved by human devices,” but, in time, would fade “like a dream.” Following Pierce”s election as president of the United States, Hawthorne was appointed consul in Liverpool in 1853, shortly after the publication of the Tanglewood Tales. This position, considered the most lucrative in the foreign service at the time, was described by Hawthorne”s wife as “second in dignity only to the embassy in London. In 1857, the end of the Pierce administration deprived him of these functions. The Hawthorne family then toured France and Italy. During his stay in Italy, Hawthorne, who had been hairless until then, grew a bushy mustache. He returned to the United States in 1860, just before the Civil War, after spending two years in Italy gathering material for his novel The Marble Faun.

The family returned to The Wayside in 1860. That same year, The Marble Faun was published, his first book in seven years. Hawthorne admits that he has aged considerably, describing himself as “wrinkled with age and deranged.

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Last years and deaths

Pierce, who became unpopular because of his support for the slave cause, was probably the only close friend of the writer, who hardly took to social life. The last years of his life are marked by illness, depression and bouts of dementia.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Hawthorne traveled with William D. Ticknor to Washington, D.C., where he met with Abraham Lincoln and others. He recounts his experiences in the essay Chiefly About War Matters in 1862.

His failing health prevented him from completing several novels. Suffering from a stomach ache, Hawthorne insisted on taking a trip with his friend Franklin Pierce, although his neighbor Bronson Alcott considered him far too ill. While visiting the White Mountains, Hawthorne died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Pierce sent a telegram to Elizabeth Peabody to inform Hawthorne”s wife in person; the news caused her such grief that she was unable to make the funeral arrangements herself. Hawthorne”s son Julian, then a freshman at Harvard College, learns of his father”s death the next day; coincidentally, it is the same day that he is initiated into the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, during which he is placed, blindfolded, in a coffin. Longfellow wrote a poem in tribute to Hawthorne, published in 1866 as The Bells of Lynn. Hawthorne is buried on a hill, now known as “Authors” Ridge,” in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. Among the pallbearers were Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Alcott, James Thomas Fields and Edwin Percy Whipple. Emerson wrote of the funeral, “I thought there was a tragic element in the event, which might be more fully rendered, in the painful solitude of the man, which I suppose could not be longer endured, and he died of it.”

His wife Sophia and his daughter Una, initially buried in England, were reinterred in June 2006 in graves close to the one in Hawthorne.

Hawthorne is known today for his short stories, which he called tales, and for his four major novels of 1850-1860: The Scarlet Letter (Valjoie), 1860. Earlier, Hawthorne published anonymously another novel, Fanshawe, in 1828 at the very beginning of his career.

Hawthorne published a great many short stories during his long writing career in various journals, including The New-England Magazine and The United States Democratic Review, either unsigned or using a pseudonym. These short stories, or tales, were collected in 1837 in a collection entitled Twice-Told Tales, published by Hawthorne for the first time under his real identity.

On August 5, 1850, Hawthorne met Herman Melville, his younger brother by about fifteen years, at a picnic organized by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne”s collection which he praised in a famous article (“Hawthorne and His Mosses”). Despite their friendship, the two men gradually drifted apart after the publication of The House of the Seven Gables. Melville dedicated his Moby Dick to Hawthorne, however, and their correspondence provides valuable insight into the composition of the novel. Hawthorne”s letters to Melville have been lost.

Hawthorne”s writing is set against the backdrop of colonial New England. His short stories are generally moral allegories influenced by his research and extensive reading on American history. Thus, contrary to popular opinion, Hawthorne did not write Puritan works (he himself had a liberal upbringing), but works about Puritanism, whose hypocrisy and intransigent rigorism he criticized. His works also show a certain distance from the religious patriotism of his time, which was often inspired by Puritan themes to describe the fate of the United States

Ethan Brand (1850) tells the story of a lime burner who goes on the road to seek the “unpardonable sin,” and in doing so, commits it. One of Hawthorne”s most famous short stories, The Birth Mark (1843), concerns a young doctor who removes a nevus from his wife”s face and, in doing so, kills his patient: he learns too late that it was the birthmark, the defect itself, that had kept her alive.

Recent studies have focused on Hawthorne”s narrative mode, characterizing it as a self-conscious rhetorical construction that should not be confused with Hawthorne”s own voice. Such an approach complicates the longstanding and dominant tradition of Hawthorne as a dark, guilt-ridden moralist.

Review

Edgar Allan Poe devotes two reviews to Hawthorne of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Full of contempt for allegory and moral tales, Poe also accuses Hawthorne of plagiarizing several of his tales. Nevertheless, he considered that “Mr. Hawthorne is one of the few American novelists whom the critic can praise with his hand on his heart. He is not always original in the entirety of his theme (I am not even sure that he has not borrowed an idea or two from a gentleman whom I know very well and who honors himself with the borrowing) but, on the other hand, his treatment of the theme is always entirely original. Though never vigorous, his style is purity itself. His imagination is rich. His artistic sense is exquisite and his skill in execution is great. He has little or no variety of tone. He treats all subjects in the same half-tone, misty, dreamy mode, by suggestion and allusion, and though I regard him, on the whole, as the truest genius our literature possesses, I cannot help looking upon him as the most inveterate mannerist of his age.” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “Nathaniel Hawthorne”s reputation as a writer is a truly pleasing fact, for his writing is not good for anything, and it is a tribute to the man.” Henry James also praised Hawthorne, saying, “The best thing about Hawthorne was that he loved the deepest psychology and in his own way tried to become familiar with it.” The poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote that he admired the “strange and subtle beauty” of Hawthorne”s stories. Evert Augustus Duyckinck said of Hawthorne: “Among American writers destined to live, he is the most original, the least indebted to foreign models or literary precedents of any kind.

In general, Hawthorne”s contemporaries hailed the sentimentality and moral purity of his work, while more modern judgments dwelt on its dark psychological complexity. In the early 1950s, critics emphasized the work”s symbolism and didacticism.

Critic Harold Bloom has expressed the opinion that only Henry James and William Faulkner challenge Hawthorne”s position as the greatest American novelist, while admitting that he considers James remains, in his opinion, the greatest American novelist . Bloom considers Hawthorne”s greatest works to be The Scarlet Letter, followed by The Marble Faun, and certain short stories, including My Kinsman, Major Molineux, Young Master Brown, Wakefield and Feathertop.

Jorge Luis Borges gives a lecture on Nathaniel Hawthorne in March 1949 at the Colegio libro de estudios superiores in Buenos Aires. Later published in the definitive edition of Otras Inquisiciones in 1974 (first edition 1952). It can be found in French, in a translation by Alain Calame, in the latest edition of Enquêtes, published by Gallimard (Folio essais)

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Collections of short stories

Published in French under other titles, with a different compilation.

Other publication

Sources