Hawthorne in the Field: The American Notebooks as New England Nature Writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT While Nathaniel Hawthorne may not conventionally be seen as a nature writer, this essay argues that he is a specifically regional nature writer, responding to and describing the contents and qualities of New England landscapes not as abstractions of an idealized natural world but as concrete places that have been shaped by particularly regional patterns of human use taking place within a discrete set of environmental circumstances. That is, I argue that there is such a thing as a regionally distinct “New England nature” and that Hawthorne writes as a sort of field investigator of that natural world, an approach quite different from that taken by his Transcendentalist contemporaries like Emerson and Thoreau.