From the Editor’s Gable

Abstract

The essays in the Spring 2022 issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review cover a range of topics from Hawthorne and Christianity to Hawthorne’s view of the super/natural and his understanding of Native American culture; and from Hawthorne and nineteenth-century news/propaganda to a consideration of Hawthorne inflected through scientific, twenty-first-century understandings of digital knowledge.The two lead essays suggest a welcome resurgence of interest in The House of the Seven Gables. In the first essay, “Christian Moralism in The House of the Seven Gables,” Jonathan Cook presents a case for Hawthorne’s views of secularized moralistic forms in mid-nineteenth-century Protestantism through an analysis of the Pyncheon and Maule families amidst the backdrop of their feuding history in the novel. Cook brings his background in biblical history to bear on a religious dimension under-remarked since the work of Hyatt Waggoner.1 In fact, the Fall 2022 issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, on Hawthorne and religion, will be guest-edited by Cook. In the second essay of this collection, “‘A kind of privilege to haunt’: Settler-Structures, Land-Based Knowledge, and the Agency of the (Super)Natural in The House of the Seven Gables,” CJ Scruton represents another realm of Hawthorne, the supernatural, in Hawthorne’s famous second novel, a topic that is the recent focus of critical exploration.2 Scruton’s approach is unique in their consideration of the nexus between the natural and supernatural realms and the concomitant anxieties revolving around the early New England settlers’ conflict with natural spaces and Native American presence. Together with CJ Scruton, I am planning a special issue of NHR on Hawthorne, nature/Hawthorne, and the environment for our Spring 2023 issue. Please note the details for “Call for Papers” for Spring 2023 is at the end of this issue.The third essay in this issue is quite timely, as it explores the idea of fake news and conspiracy theory so prevalent today. In “‘A respectable narrative’: The Viral Load in ‘Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe,’” Hannah Murray makes the case that Dominicus Pike, the main character of the story, attempting to increase his importance in terms of social mobility and cultural capital, comes up with stories (which move from gossip, to oral tales, to print media). However, his comeuppance is that his new and fraudulent sense of identity is his unmaking. The final two essays in this issue speak to a positive use of technology—in the realm of computers, as a source for positive communication. Gale Temple, in “The Hermeneutics of Implication and Inference: Actor-Network Theory, The Scarlet Letter, and the Hawthorne Digital Archive,” explores how the Hawthornean model for community-making offers us a creative way of connecting literary interpretation with digital resources. In the final essay of this issue, “A Meaning Apart from Its Indistinguishable Words,” Erik Fredner analyzes how Hawthorne is different from his fellow writers and how his ambivalence can be detected through quantitative methods; Fredner’s analysis culminates in showing the satirical elements of “The Procession of Life.”The Spring 2022 issue ends again this year with a carefully wrought annual bibliography written by my former graduate student Alexis Grainger, who has an eye for detail and precision. Finally, we conclude the issue with, unfortunately, news again of the death of another important scholar, Joel Myerson, who has brought scholars many ideas and materials (and a sense of drama) to help us understand the American Renaissance better.