Hawthorne and the Sublime

Abstract

N THE STUDY OF HAWTHORNE S FicTION, ttle attention has been given to the ways in which his work draws upon the traditions of the picturesque and the sublime.' In broad terms, these conventions are the poles of Hawthorne's art. The picturesque determines the spatial finiteness that typically governs his form. His subdued landscapes and fanciful imagery are largely derivatives of picturesque style.2 As a way of looking at landscape, the picturesque views nature through the perspective of the Claude-glass or the aperture, throwing into relief a group of attributes extracted from the whole of nature for aesthetic contemplation. Irregularity of line, roughness and ruggedness of texture, the massing and graduation of light and shade, intricacy and variety of effect-the hallmarks of picturesque style first codified and popularized by William Gilpin-are deeply woven into the fabric of Hawthorne's fiction. Certain classes of objects which become standardized items of picturesque regard, such as fractured rocks, blighted trees, winding streams, and ruined buildings, appear repeatedly in his writings. The thoroughness of Hawthorne's adaptation of this graphic convention to literary art distinguishes him from Irving, Cooper, and Thoreau, among other writers of the romantic period in America, who also responded in a variety of ways to the picturesque tradition. The peculiar value of this mode for Hawthorne seems to have been its power to organize the visual experience of nature in a relatively static pattern.