Hawthorne and the Problem of New England

Abstract

Regions are not only concrete geographic domains but also conceptual places. Responding in 1957 to a question about his fictional subject, William Faulkner insisted that he did not write about the South and southern civilization save as they constituted the particular “country” that he knew; his interest was “the human heart” (10). Hawthorne spoke similarly when he described himself as “burrowing … into the depths of our common nature, for the purposes of psychological romance” (XI: 4).1 Faulkner and Hawthorne did write about their regions, past and present, explicitly and on levels available to conscious control, but they also wrote from their regions insofar as their notions of “the heart” were inflected by their personal and cultural relationship to a distinctively local world and by the sense of life they introjected, half-unconsciously, from its ethos. Some writers (Melville, for one) are imaginable apart from their birthplace and authorial homes; Hawthorne is not. Over the course of his career, Hawthorne had four major “habitations” that were the scene and literal or figurative subject of his writing: Salem, MA, his ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, MA, where he lived from 1842 to 1845 (and again in 1852–53 and after 1860) and came into contact with the Adamic spirit of the American Renaissance; England, where he served as consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857, and where he felt himself more “surrounded by materialisms, and hemmed in with the grossness of this earthly life, than anywhere else” in his experience (XXII: 433); and Italy, where he resided through most of 1858–59, drafted The Marble Faun (1860), and was challenged, like James's Americans abroad, by the obliquities of an older, denser civilization morally as well as culturally at variance with his own. Beyond geographical localities, “habitations” thus imply mental residences, or regions of thought and sensibility associated with place but not narrowly co-extensive with it and having their own distinctive attitudes, colorations, and constellation of themes. Of these habitations, New England, or “Salem,” has priority not simply because it was the first but because, like Faulkner's South, it was the lens through which he processed all the others. In this respect, Hawthorne never left “Salem” or divested himself of his identity-shaping ambivalence toward New England.