Henry James's Hawthorne

Abstract

In 1879 Henry James was contracted by Macmillan & Co. to write a monograph on Nathaniel Hawthorne. James wrote to Hawthorne's son, Julian Hawthorne, that he had taken on the commission ‘reluctantly’, believing that, whatever were his qualifications for writing about Hawthorne, it ‘seemed … that … it should, if possible, be done by an American’.1 James felt that Hawthorne's work could be best interpreted by a reader who was familiar with American, and specifically New England, society. As he would write in Hawthorne (1879): ‘it is an almost indispensable condition of properly appreciating [Hawthorne] to have received a personal impression of the manners, the morals, indeed of the very climate, of the great region of which the remarkable city of Boston is the metropolis’.2 These were the conditions of life which, as James later wrote in Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), Hawthorne experienced as an American writer who ‘proved to what use American matter could be put by an American hand’, and who showed that ‘an American could be an artist, one of the finest, without “going outside” about it’.3Hawthorne has generated a large amount of diverse critical commentary, but there is a significant consensus that James sought to illustrate the limitations of Hawthorne's art and the more general limitations of American artistic endeavour on the eve of the decade in which his own first great realist novels appeared. This was the view held by such influential twentieth-century critics of James as Lionel Trilling, Richard Poirier, and Richard Brodhead. One reason why Hawthorne is seen as such an important critical text is that its unfavourable judgements on Hawthorne's work look forward to a new era of realism in American fiction. Certainly, James remarks on ‘the absence in Hawthorne of [the] … quality of realism’ (p. 321), and complains that The Scarlet Letter contains ‘little elaboration of detail, of the modern realism of research’, and that it suffers from ‘a want of reality’ (p. 404). It is true that Hawthorne is an important text in the history of American realism. I want to argue, however, that it also acknowledges the worth of Hawthorne's example as an American writer who used the necessary and inescapable conditions of life in America for his own artistic ends. I will suggest that James's consideration of what he called Hawthorne's ‘old Puritan moral sense’ (p. 365) led him to make assertions about Hawthorne's fiction of an innovative kind which have been misunderstood by later commentators. In doing so, I will seek to account for the continued attraction of James's critical procedures for a modern reader.