From the Editor’s Gable

Abstract

The fall 2021 issue is an interesting assortment of essays, the themes of which interconnect and overlap, even though this is not a special issue. In the first essay, “‘To continue their illustrious breed’: Aristocracy, Democracy, and the Search for Dignity in The House of the Seven Gables,” Martin J. Groff examines power structures in Hawthorne’s second novel—contrasting the traditional aristocracy of the Colonel and the Judge with the more liberal capitalism of Hepzibah and Holgrave—to ascertain Hawthorne’s views on the possibility of a true democracy. In “A Somewhat Wilder Grace: Hawthorne, Humboldt, and Withstanding the Collapse of Nature into Symbol in The House of the Seven Gables,” Evan Manzanetti also examines The House of the Seven Gables, but through the lens of a burgeoning sense of ecological thinking, as he examines Hawthorne’s views of nature in that novel with the environmental philosophy of Humboldt. In “‘No Such Fairy Land, so like the real world’: Miles Coverdale’s Performance of the Utopian Spectacle,” Ashley Rattner looks at the demise of the Brook Farm utopia (1841–1847) and Hawthorne’s short-lived stay (April–November 1841) to analyze the relationship between Hawthorne and his reader; Hawthorne attempts to provide a corrective to the audience who would equate the narrator with the author. In “Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Reframing of That ‘which Milton tells about’: Literary Influence and Blithedale’s Queer Masque,” Matthew Joseph Helm offers another view of The Blithedale Romance by analyzing two modes of influence. He illustrates how some critics seeking to establish a national literature saw the novel in a positive light, but that other more conservative readers questioned his unorthodox depiction of marriage. Helm also shows how Hawthorne’s romance recasts characters from Milton in order to sub-vert ideas about hetero-patriarchal lineage. In the final essay, “‘A Deeper and More Conscious Silence’: Aurality in Thoreau and Hawthorne’s Journals and Later Works,” Michael S. Martin examines Hawthorne’s journalistic writings (in his Notebooks) and his novels in terms of his interest in silence and then aligns those ideas with Thoreau’s own commentary about silence; by making these comparisons, Martin shows how distant the twen-ty-first-century audience has become in their own attitudes toward silence. These interesting essays about capitalism, environmentalism, author-reader relationships, radical views of marriage, and provocative silences reveal a Hawthorne less conservative than critics have often made him out to be. The issue ends with a review by Ariel Clark Silver of David Diamond’s recent book, Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation (2021), Diamond’s upbeat character analysis invites the reader to see happy endings to Hawthorne novels, often read as culminating in dark conclusions.I would like to thank my Dean, Dr. Peter Kingstone, and my chairman, Dr. Jonathan Greenberg, for their continued support of my editorship.