Land of Hope and Fear

...He found endless ways of embodying this tension, in a life that was both cautiously provincial and perpetually unsettled...

...He had already written such classic stories as "Roger Malvin's Burial," "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," and "Young Goodman Brown," but chose, for his usual mysterious reasons, not to include them...

...But Hawthorne has had a rough time of it in recent years...

...The years at Bowdoin were important for a variety of reasons...

...These early stories all show the typically static Hawthornian characters frozen compulsively in moral dilemmas, often self-chosen, and they all run on a prose style that conveys gauzy, dreamlike distance rather than novelistic clarity and specificity...

...Born in Salem on the Fourth of July in 1804, Hawthorne was a paradox from start to finish: The isolated and brooding child of an old and rooted family, he became the first great literary voice of a boisterous, restless new nation...

...The great virtue of Philip McFarland's charming and immensely readable Hawthorne in Concord is to show us the writer not as the radically isolated man he imagined himself, but as a member of a lively community of writers and thinkers: Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, the Alcotts, the Manns, and the Peabodys...

...Then, just as suddenly as his decision to depart, Wakefield decides to return and put an end to "the little joke" that he has played "at his wife's expense...

...Or "Rappaccini's Daughter," a complex allegory in which a beautiful young woman, as an experiment in the control of nature by her scientist father, has been raised on a diet of poisonous plants to make her self-sufficient—and ends up being killed by her lover when he administers an antidote to the poison...

...One could plausibly argue that Hawthorne was at his most inspired in his early short fiction...

...The story is presented as an imaginative reconstruction derived from scraps in an old periodical, just the kind of framing device Hawthorne loved to use...

...consul...

...Much of the Hawthorne scholarship emanating from academic English departments during the past two decades has been dominated by "New Historicism," which has tended to reduce Hawthorne to little more than the sum of his unacceptably skeptical or reactionary positions on the burning issues of his day: slavery, abolitionism, women's rights, the conditions of the laboring classes, movements of radical social reform...

...The sense of place was, for Hawthorne, a haunted and confining thing at best...

...Accordingly, in an influential 1991 book, Sacvan Bercovitch disparaged The Scarlet Letter as an ideologically conservative work of "thick propaganda," a "vehicle of continuity" that opposed radical change and celebrated the tawdry American icons of "gradualism and consensus...

...It was lodged in the heart, "the little, yet boundless sphere...

...This seems especially true for students who've grown up in the age of Bill and Monica...

...What a bitter sadness it would be, Hawthorne reflected at the end of "Earth's Holocaust," if "Man's agelong endeavor for perfection" served only to "render him the mockery of the Evil Principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at the very root of the matter...

...Yet writing such a tale, far from being an act of symbolic transgression, was surely an act of self-disclosure, and self-mortification—for Wakefield was, in part, Hawthorne himself, or Hawthorne as he feared he was becoming...

...Others found it incomprehensible that Hawthorne, who was an extraordinarily handsome man, with captivating eyes that were, in the admiring words of Elizabeth Pea-body, "like mountain lakes seeking to reflect the heavens," chose to withdraw into the blue chamber of his soul...

...This hasn't been a popular thing to notice since the Enlightenment's disenchantment of the world, and it is completely at odds with the therapeutic ethos that now reigns...

...But his exalted sense of authorial calling was accompanied by an equally powerful apprehension that the work of a writer could not qualify as "man's work...

...Take for example the baffling story "Wakefield," which had first appeared two years earlier in New-England Magazine...

...They may help keep alive the possibility of a more respectful audience for Hawthorne, during a dry season that dismisses him too easily, and may need him more than it suspects...

...Americans seem generally unaware of their literature's disquieting features...

...The commencement address at Hawthorne's 1825 graduation—delivered by fellow graduate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and entitled "Our Native Writers"—offered a passionate plea for a new American literature, "springing up in the shadow of our free institutions...

...Yet out of this tortured state would finally come, slowly but surely, a body of short fiction that would eventually make up his Twice-Told Tales (1837), the work with which he finally emerged in the public eye...

...In fact, however, there are deeper themes in Hawthorne that may never before have been as salient as they are in our own times...

...To make matters worse, he was an ardent American nationalist and expansionist...

...The minister chooses to conceal his part in the matter, although profound feelings of guilt gnaw away at him...

...This doesn't sound like the stuff of which genteel outings at the lake are made...

...But those ambitions also had a nationalistic tinge to them, for he hoped, as he told his mother, to produce works that would be regarded as equals to the "proudest productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull...

...He was "spell-bound," an illustration of the principle that "an influence, beyond our control, lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity...

...Wineap-ple sees "The Birth-mark" strictly as a tale of sexual anxiety, in which "a man confronts marriage, and hence sexuality, with horror...

...These irony-filled allegorical tales, with their constant reversals and inversions, are also warnings about the moral perils of human efforts to gain mastery over the terms of human existence...

...of American literature...

...At its best, Hawthorne's prose achieves an uncanny quality in which the fiber of familiar reality gives way...

...If he was not quite able to reembrace the Christian theology of his forebears in all its details, his invocation of an "original wrong" was a long and respectful bow to the explanatory power of their most fundamental assertion...

...Of course, there is more to Hawthorne's life than his years of painful and anonymous alienation...

...If the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, however, it is so partly because such fear protects us against the fatal presumption of mastery—a fearlessness much more to be feared than fear itself...

...all the misery of the world derives from that "original wrong...

...How then does one account for the unsettling preoccupations of those authors: the desperate God-grappling of Herman Melville, the macabre fixations of Edgar Allan Poe, the fevered omnisexuality of Walt Whitman, the nature-intoxicated anarchism of Henry David Thoreau...

...But what they can't comprehend is what all the fuss is about—why Dimmesdale felt so guilty, why he couldn't confess, why what he and Hester did was in fact a grievous sin, why our sins and the sins of our forebears are inseparable from who we are, why those sins must be paid for, why it is almost impossible to pay for them fully, and yet why sins that remain unacknowledged and unconfessed and unpaid will surely destroy our souls...

...The human heart is where the problem is, and where the only solution can be found...

...An ordinary Londoner named Wakefield—"a man of habits" —leaves his wife, allegedly on a short business trip to the country, of no more than a few days...

...But both books are well written and sensibly argued, with only a modicum of interpretive excess or psychoanalytic license...

...He came out of his shell a bit and initiated some of the most lasting relationships of his life, notably his friendship with Franklin Pierce, a future president of the United States...

...During those twenty years, Wake-field feels compelled occasionally to spy on his wife, although always with an electrifying feeling of terror at the thought of being found out...

...But if Hawthorne was partly a romantic, he was even more of a Hebrew prophet, a throwback to the Isaiah who reviled the hardened and self-satisfied hearts of his contempo-raries—and prophesied that the hidden things would come to the light and the pitiful wisdom of the wise would be destroyed...

...Pretty depressing stuff, when you consider how much better off everyone would have been, if they could just have . . . well, gotten over it and moved on...

...It increasingly seems that the only point of keeping Hawthorne around is to have him handy as a whipping boy...

...They say the same, and then some, about Nathaniel Hawthorne and his characters...

...Land of Hope and Fear Nathaniel Hawthorne and the American past By WILFRED M. MCCLAY Of all the complaints leveled at the canon of nineteenth-century American books, the hardest to credit is the charge that they are conventional and comfortable—like picturesque little pleasure boats plying the sunny surface of American life...

...These readings may or may not be accurate...

...And it was he, and not Emerson or Thoreau, who was willing to go live in George Rip-ley's utopian experimental community Brook Farm for seven months (and then, like any red-blooded American opportunist, turn his experience into publishable prose with The Blithedale Romance...

...Thankfully, though, an important counterbalance to these influences has come from the biographical literature on Hawthorne...

...Hawthorne may have changed the spelling of his own surname partly to avail himself of the American promise of a fresh beginning...

...But Hawthorne means the story to show how easily each of us, if diverted from the comfortable and familiar, can find himself "the Outcast of the Universe...

...It's hard to improve on what one of my students said during a class discussion of Whittaker Chambers's passionate and gloomy autobiography, Witness...

...And she reads "Rappaccini's Daughter" as a "biographical palimpsest" in which the evil doctor is his father-in-law, or perhaps Emerson, and the young woman "represents a woman's struggle to free herself" from confinement and "irresolute men...

...Hawthorne's appeal to the heart over the intellect aligns him, once again, with the romanticism that was sweeping through the salons of Boston and Concord in his day...

...Take, for example, the exalted status accorded The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 masterpiece, the first indisputably great work Author, most recently, of Religion Returns to the Public Square, Wilfred M. McClay teaches history and humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga...

...Or "Earth's Holocaust," in which a fire begun to rid the world of its "accumulation of worn-out trumpery" ends up consuming everything and leaving the world no better...

...Certainly the reader can see the characteristic lines of his thought, in ways that would not be much altered or improved upon in the later work...

...He sees her grow old and portly, adjusting resignedly to her widowhood, a woman whose "regrets have either died away, or have become so essential to her heart, that they would be poorly exchanged for joy...

...That is true, but not true enough...

...McFarland says that "Earth's Holocaust" is less a story than a sketch "reflecting on contemporary issues...

...If, however, one thinks less about place than about milieu, then McFar-land's angle of vision becomes very useful, for it reminds us of how enmeshed Hawthorne was in many of the most characteristic enthusiasms of his day...

...Other critics, such as Jane Tompkins, concluded that Hawthorne's high literary reputation has been undeserved, having been propped up artificially by patriarchal networks of critical opinion...

...His own tendencies toward introversion and bookishness were only accentuated by a youthful foot injury, which kept him indoors a great deal of the time...

...The problem, of course, is politics...

...After college, he returned to Salem, and spent a mysterious twelve years living in his mother's home, incubating his talent, publishing stories here and there (usually in near-complete anonymity), and struggling with the fears and loathings that such a self-imposed isolation must have imposed upon him...

...What they find in The Scarlet Letter is the story of a minister and a married woman who had a love affair and feel bad about it after-ward—especially the man, a sensitive fellow who also turns out to be a hypocrite and a bit of a coward...

...Such words spoke directly to Hawthorne: The desire to have a hand in creating such a distinctive American literature was, as Brenda Wine-apple says, "the secret ambition lodged like a thorn in his own heart...

...Generally produced by writers operating on the fringe of the academy, that literature presents Hawthorne in a richer and more multidimensional way...

...The cuckolded husband schemes to get even, while degenerating into an ever-more loathsome monster in the process...

...He shared with his longtime friend John O'Sullivan a belief in "the essential equality of all humanity," in which "all ranks of men would begin life on a fair field"—and believed that it was America's destiny to spread this doctrine across the continent...

...His father was a sea captain who died in Dutch Surinam of yellow fever when Nathaniel was four...

...Given such difficulties, one might have hoped that the academy at least would keep Hawthorne's reputation alive...

...Instead, he rents rooms on a street near his home, and stays in them, living there incognito for twenty years...

...The central premise in Hawthorne's imaginative world—his insistence that the weight of the sinful human past, in one's own life, in the life of one's family, and in the life of one's city and country, can never be denied or wished away—is completely lost on a generation raised on smug therapeutic platitudes...

...But they are essentially trivial in comparison to the profounder meanings that leap off of these pages today...

...Such a rough-and-tumble practical-mindedness in politics might seem out of character with his authorial ambitions, but the two were united by a strong sense of American cultural destiny...

...Brenda Wineapple's biography adroitly traces the twists and turns in this relentless struggle of authorship, showing it as a continuously formative theme in Hawthorne's entire career...

...It is vintage Hawthorne, a weird and troubling little story, filled with misogyny and bottomless despair...

...We are left in the dark about how he was received...

...Consider a story such as "The Birth-mark," in which a scientist insists on removing from his beautiful wife's left cheek a crimson birthmark, her sole imperfection, and inadvertently kills her in the process...

...He was both deeply proud of his Puritan family pedigree and deeply troubled by it, not least by the fact that his great-grandfather John Hathorne had been one of the judges in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials...

...He knew that the literary artist could easily become a heartless man like Wakefield, "dissevered from the world," reduced to being an observer, a wraith cut off from the world he claims to understand...

...W]ithout thy aid, my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions...

...It was part of the family tradition, one that formed the basis for his novel The House of the Seven Gables, that the family house retained a curse brought down upon it by that forebear's deeds...

...The penchant for symbolism and allegory is there—together with the spooky echoes of past sins and the creepy defamiliarization of ordinary life, which is seen to hide strangeness and horror beneath its thin veneer...

...In fact, such a list makes one wonder whether there has ever been a great national literature more full of craziness and inflationary excess, more indifferent to measure and proportion, more riddled with anxiety and self-doubt...

...The more enduring reality about Hawthorne seems to have been his restlessness, his inability to be content in any setting— whether Salem, Maine, Boston, Concord, West Roxbury, Lenox, West Newton, or Liverpool, where his friend President Pierce had appointed him U.S...

...This collection of tales, all of them previously published, included some of his best-known short stories, "The Fountain of Youth" (later retitled "Dr...

...Hawthorne was a Jack-sonian Democrat, not a Burkean neo-Calvinist, let alone a neomedievalist crypto-Catholic...

...I should like to sail on and on forever," Hawthorne mused when returning from Rome, "and never touch the shore again...

...It's too much to hope that the recent appearance of Brenda Wineapple's Hawthorne: A Life and Philip McFarland's Hawthorne in Concord signal a turning of the scholarly tide...

...But at the same time he never ceased to acknowledge and even wallow in that heritage—in ways that profoundly affected his view not only of his own past but also of America...

...But it's hard to imagine a more bizarre candidate for a literary rite of passage—or one better calculated to establish a permanent aversion to classic literature...

...But Concord, although a place of unusual happiness for Hawthorne in the early years of his marriage, was far less important to him than Salem, and the fact that he lived in Concord on three separate occasions (and is buried there) does not appear to have translated into the town's having any particular significance for him...

...Part of Hawthorne's message makes sense to them, the part they've been trained to hear—that the Puritan religious and social code (as he understood it) was excessive, cruel, sexist, and inhuman, that it wrung all beauty and joy from life, and that the actions of the avenging husband, Roger Chillingworth, though he was technically the wronged party, were ultimately far more sinister than those of the unconfessed adulterer, the Reverend Arthur Dimmes-dale, and his near-blameless lover, Hester Prynne...

...We hardly need the assistance of Hawthorne to understand it, and if his reputation were to hang on that alone he would not really deserve the high status he is granted...

...In the company of Pierce and other Bowdoin friends, he discovered a passion for partisan politics, settling easily into the political sympathies of a Jacksonian Democrat, an outlook that would stay with him for the rest of his life and help immunize him against the Whiggery and evangelical reformism that dominated his literary circles...

...If we go no deeper than the Intellect," he warned, striving, "with merely that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is wrong," then the result will be no more substantial than a dream...

...And what was that error...

...But the alienated artist, with his joys and fears, is by now an exhausted, even tiresome, theme...

...By the time he went off to college at Bowdoin in 1821, he was already fairly certain that he would not aspire to any of the conventional masculine careers of business, the clergy, the law, or medicine...

...And as Hawthorne confessed poignantly to Mary's sister, Sophia Peabody, who would soon be his wife: "Thou only has taught me that I have a heart...

...Or "The Celestial Rail-road," in which the hard path of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is replaced by an easy and convenient railway, which carries its comfortable passengers straight to Hell...

...But, for reasons that are never explained, involving some deep and inscrutable psychological compulsion, he decides not to return...

...Even Rome, a place where the past was never dead, reminded him in the end of a rotting corpse...

...Surely an author so politically benighted must have produced works that "inscribed" all the worst features of American life...

...The dude just needed to chill," he murmured, gazing down at his fingertips, a tiny smile playing upon his lips—affectless contempt expressed in perfect twenty-first-century pitch...

...The woman, an impressively resilient spirit who bore a love-child out of that furtive encounter, is publicly humiliated...

...Especially in a handful of his most powerful short stories, Hawthorne's work forces us to observe the essential moral value of fear...

...Heidegger's Experiment"), "The Minister's Black Veil," and "The May-Pole of Merry Mount...

...Writing became, as Wineapple neatly puts it, "a source of shame as much as pleasure, and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve...

...Unfortunately, the interpretations of such stories offered by both Wineap-ple and McFarland fall short...

...In the end, everyone lives (or dies) unhappily ever after...

...So he grew up with his eccentric, reclusive mother and sisters in an entirely female house...

...It is customary to see him as the soberly pessimistic countervoice to Emerson's wild optimism, the cautionary voice of the repressed past, the unredeemed present, and the unre-formable future...

...He does not go to another woman, or to some faraway place to begin a new life...

...The other students nodded agreement...

...He always puts himself in his books," opined his sister-in-law Mary, wife of the great educator Horace Mann, "he cannot help it...

...Leaving aside the spidery intricacies of the prose in The Scarlet Letter, and the lack of action in its plot, what really dooms the novel for present-day readers is the alien intensity of its moral universe...

...Instead, he was already setting his sights upon becoming "an Author, and relying for support upon my pen...

...For much of the twentieth century, an acquaintance with The Scarlet Letter was considered an essential part of American education...

...That ambition would be a long time in the realization...

...McFarland casually compares this effect to the "magical realism" of Gabriel Garria Marquez, but that utterly fails to capture the terrifying moral energy swirling through Hawthorne's writing...

...So too do the dreamy and gothic elements in his fiction...