Along the Wayside, Spring 2022

Abstract

Hawthorne is well and alive, as witnessed by various conference presentations. Among these are:Hawthorne opens The Marble Faun (1860) with “a familiar kind of Preface.” His preface is familiar for two reasons: first, the practice was by then conventional, and second, it is addressed to “that friend of friends, that unseen brother of the soul, whose apprehensive sympathy has so often encouraged me to be egotistical in my Prefaces.” His only concern is that in the interval since his last publication, “that all-sympathizing critic” might have died or lost interest. My paper will chart Hawthorne’s transition from the obscurest man to a living lion of American letters. By the end of his career, as Richard Brodhead has demonstrated, Hawthorne had become one of his very own literary inheritors. But there is a great deal of continuity between the anonymous teller of stories and the acclaimed historical romancer. “The Battle-Omen,” a tale he published anonymously in the Salem Gazette in 1830, will be examined as a case in point. Hawthorne’s omission of the tale from his three short-story collections may be explained by the liberal use he made of it in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Hawthorne’s novel ends with Dimmesdale’s Election Day sermon, which will steer my analysis back to “The Custom-House,” where the author famously remarks that Salem “ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.” Of course, to apply an additional turn of the screw to Dickinson’s poetic homage to her fellow reclusive New Englander, one need not live in Salem to be haunted.Hawthorne’s novels model a form of gothic sympathy, for they suggest that we bond most authentically through the tacit acknowledgment of our shared repressions. With a specific focus on The Scarlet Letter, this paper will argue that gothic sympathy invites us to eschew the pressures of individual and collective ego maintenance and instead embrace our affinity with abjection, a gesture that is simultaneously horrifying and alluring, for although it forces us to confront the threat of self-dissolution, it also offers the potential for jouissance, for a liberating reacquaintance with versions of ourselves and intimate associations that we once thought were foreclosed.In 1857, after his term as Consul in Liverpool expired, Nathaniel Hawthorne, family in tow, began a tour of France and Italy that would ultimately form the basis of his final novel, The Marble Faun (1860). Armed with the popular travel books of the era, a Murray’s travel guide and Hillard’s Six Months in Italy, Hawthorne undertook the viewing of a dizzying array of artist’s studios, galleries, and museums during his first few months in Italy. His reactions to the art he viewed, preserved in his Italian Notebooks, vary from contemplative to confused and even flippant at times. He was wholly overwhelmed by the volume of art preserved in Rome, which he deemed to be unnecessarily generous considering its quality, and very critical of the state in which it was kept. His responses to the art that he did deem valuable were mixed—he at times attempted to respond to it in a short prose passage, and at times he simply declined to comment due to lack of inspiration or mood. This conference paper surveys Hawthorne’s emotive responses to art within the context of contemporary art criticism. It argues that Hawthorne’s emotional connections with art varies over the course of his career, culminating in The Marble Faun, a novel built on the complications of sympathetic signification through art.