HAWTHORNE'S HABITATIONS: A LITERARY LIFE

Abstract

HAWTHORNE'S HABITATIONS: A LITERARY LIFE. By Robert Milder. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2013. xiv + 295 pp. $39.95.In many respects the Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) whom we encounter in Robert Milder's Hawthorne's Habitations would not have seemed unfamiliar to Herman Melville, who, in an 1851 letter to the author himself, observed that, "did circumstances permit, [he] should like nothing better than to devote an elaborate and careful paper to the full consideration and analysis of the purport and significance" of the preoccupation with a "certain tragic phase of humanity" that "so strongly characterizes all of [Hawthorne's] writings"-the "tragicalness," as he puts it, "of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings" (Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, vol. 1 [Boston: Houghton, 1884], 387). The elusive Hawthorne inspired and indeed encouraged "tragical" responses of this sort in part because he wrote in so tantalizing a fashion about what he described in "The Custom House" section of The Scarlet Letter (Boston: Ticknor, 1850) as a purported "inmost me" kept always "behind its veil" (2). Hawthorne perhaps thus insured that his self-haunted works would not merely endure but in some sense prevail over generations of readers, critics, and scholars intent on forcing the locked door of what his friend George Hillard described in 1850 as the "blue chamber" of Hawthorne's soul, a real or imagined Gothic crypt into which, as Hillard thought, the author himself "hardly dared to enter" (Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Memories of Hawthorne [Boston: Houghton, 1897], qtd. on 121-22).A master of ambiguity, a state he may have deemed the only honest aesthetic response to the problem of existence, Hawthorne was also an adept manipulator of audiences (see the oft-ignored "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" [1837]) and a purveyor of ironies so subtle they seem to vibrate in and out of existence. To this day we seek him here and we seek him there, very much as Baroness Orczy's eternally frustrated "Frenchies" sought their "demned elusive" Scarlet Pimpernel (Emma Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel [New York: Grosset, 1905], 117). It has long been fashionable to read Hawthorne's works as covertly autobiographical, but like the subject of the "ancient picture" in "Edward Randolph's Portrait" (1838), over which "Time had thrown an impenetrable veil," leaving it to "tradition, and fable, and conjecture, to say what had once been there portrayed," the author's psychological lineaments have remained stubbornly obscure. Often, in fact, his oeuvre has seemed less a series of portraits than a fun house full of antique mirrors in the mysterious and abysmal depths of which critics have discerned only their own reflected and distorted countenances rather than that of the appalling and enticing Monsieur du Miroir.No author of a work of criticism can hope to be entirely free of projection, and if it is therefore not entirely absent from Hawthorne's Habitations (the somber, tormented subject, an existentialist born out of his due time whose "fictions rest on a barely concealed intuition of the void" [20], appears to share many of Milder's own ontological concerns), the book is not less interesting on that account. Though rather tragic than otherwise, this Hawthorne is a very interesting personage. Written in graceful, clear, and often elegant prose (no small thing in these parlous times) and impeccably edited, Hawthorne's Habitations is a consistently intriguing book. As the dust jacket describes, the book's ten chapters and epilogue constitute a "literary/biographical study" of the "self-divided man and writer" as he lived and worked in Salem, Concord, England, and Italy. Each of these locations represents a "habitation"-not merely a locale but a "mental residence, or region of thought and sensibility rooted in time and place" (ix). Not "a formal biography, but more than a work of literary criticism" (xi), the book explores the complex and often ambiguous ways in which both the author and his works were shaped by these habitations (which, from the point of view of a culture historian, are only vaguely sketched in). …