It is curious, how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss the grandest, or sweetest of prospects, by reason of an intervening hedge, so like all other hedges, as in no way to hint of the wide landscape beyond. So has it been with me concerning the enchanting landscape in the soul of this Hawthorne, this most excellent Man of Mosses. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses" (1850) In the fall of 1851, Hawthorne wrote the preface to his last collection of stories, The Snow-Image; and Other Twice-told Tales. Departing from his practice in remarks introducing previous volumes, he does not directly address the reading public but instead his Bowdoin College classmate and closest friend, Horatio Bridge, to whom the volume is dedicated. Bridge, as everyone knows, silently paid for the publication of Hawthorne's first collection of stories, Twice-told Tales (1837). At one point in the 1851 preface, as he glosses autobiographical details spanning his career as a fiction monger, Hawthorne declares: "Was there ever such a weary delay in obtaining the slightest recognition from the public, as in my case? I sat down by the wayside of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity" (11:5). Considering that his tales had acquired something of a reputation in the 1830s, he may be exaggerating his having received little recognition by downplaying the accumulated notice that they had received. Moreover, his claim ignores the fact that during the first decade of publishing tales and sketches in gift books, magazines, and newspapers, he chose not to have his name attached to them until Bridges generous intervention, at which point he had his name printed in the two volumes of tales. Be that as it may, what interests me in the prefatory passage in The Snow Image lies less in Hawthorne's estimation of his scant reputation than in the reference to the "wayside of life." What does Hawthorne mean by a wayside? What relationship might be suggested between enchantment and wayside? What if anything might this relation have to do with Hawthornes authorial project? And finally, what are the cultural implications of the wayside of life in relation to his authorship? By exploring these central questions, I should like to argue that the wayside assumes a special significance for Hawthorne, one that can be traced through many tales and, I should like to stress, in complex ways in The Scarlet Letter. The OED defines wayside as "The side of a road or path, the land bordering either side of the way." The "way" is the path or road itself. The word still echoes in our highway, freeway, thruway, parkway, beltway. Anywhere along the way lies a wayside--a by the way--whether a stationary site or a road less travelled by. Were we to walk along the path or ride a coach along the road, we could step aside from our habitual way or manner of travel and thus interrupt our journey to somewhere, perhaps even defer it altogether. On the one hand, then, a wayside can be seen as a site going nowhere, located beside a route going somewhere; and on the other hand, as in the past century or so, it can be conceived of as an erstwhile route that recent interstate or multi-lane thoroughfares have rendered archaic, a byway, as it were. This latter understanding largely applies to the mid-twentieth century and beyond, say in such works as John Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie or William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, in both of which the authors spurn interstate highways in favor of what were formerly major routes but have since become back roads. For Hawthorne, the normal "way" of life, the road to what nineteenth-century New England culture deemed middle-class success, led from countrysides or villages to towns and cities--that is, from rural commerce in farming and local trade to nonagricultural employment in law, medicine, and business, all of which normally involved, especially in urban areas, the kinds of moneyed power represented in the United States by banks and stock exchanges with their inveterate, impersonal relationships. …
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Mar 17, 2022
Sean James Bosman 
Open Access