Ethan Brand Research Articles

Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World: From Salem to Somewhere Else

Hawthorne’s Histories, Hawthorne’s World: From Salem to Somewhere Else

“Then I Wouldn’t be Unneighborly Neither”: A Reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper in Light of the Influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand”

ABSTRACT Archival evidence in an early manuscript of Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper reveals that not only Hawthorne in general, but also Hawthorne’s tale “Ethan Brand” in particular, was in McCarthy’s mind during the process of composition. This essay provides a reading of The Orchard Keeper that takes into account the influence of Hawthorne’s accomplished short story. Both Hawthorne’s classic tale and McCarthy’s debut novel are preoccupied with the question of technological progress and its toll on the natural world and human community, an estimate of poor moral character as defined by acts of unneighborliness and hard-heartedness against others, and a measure of upright moral character as defined by neighborliness, wholeheartedness, and a reverence for nature. Understanding McCarthy’s debt to Hawthorne helps readers to appreciate anew the themes and moral concerns of his first and perhaps most underappreciated novel.

Wanderers of the New World: From the Jew as Other, to the Jew as (Uncanny) Double in “A Virtuoso’s Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850)

Wanderers of the New World: From the Jew as Other, to the Jew as (Uncanny) Double in “A Virtuoso’s Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850)

Wanderers of the New World: From the Jew as Other, to the Jew as (Uncanny) Double in “A Virtuoso's Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850)

AbstractThe legend of the Wandering Jew began as a European folk motif and migrated to America, where it gained a popularity unmatched in the countries of the Old World. This article focuses on the adaptation of this legend in the American gothic, and specifically on the literary rendition of the Wandering Jew in Hawthorne's “A Virtuoso's Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850). Hawthorne first staged this archetype in his short story titled “A Virtuoso's Collection,” in which the Jew serves as a chronicler and an eerie museum guide. In “Ethan Brand,” the Wandering Jew is recast as a “German Jew,” a showman carrying a diorama and showing sketches. There, he serves as both the figure of the Other and an image of the evil double. He proves to be a source of gothic horror, hinting at the pointlessness of the quest of the main protagonist, who claims to have identified and mastered the “Unpardonable Sin.” After the departure of the Jew, Brand kills himself, which could be interpreted as a victory of the doppelgänger typical of gothic tales. However, Brand's attempt to annihilate himself is incomplete, for it is mentioned in the explicit that his heart could not be burnt down. This ambiguous ending and lack of closure are true to the spirit of the legend, whereby the Jew must wander until messianic times. However, the real Jew behind the mask remains unaccounted for, as he is reduced to a mere literary representation of pure otherness.

Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance, by John Haydock

<i>Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance</i>, by John Haydock

The Book of Esther and the Typology of Female Transfiguration in American Literature, by Silver, Ariel Clark

<i>The Book of Esther and the Typology of Female Transfiguration in American Literature</i>, by Silver, Ariel Clark

A Psychoanalytical Approach to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Ethan Brand”

&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Psychoanalytical criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;em&gt; to literary works is one of the important ways to uncover the depths of author’s thinking, which also contributes to readers’ understanding of actions, characteristics, plots or even endings of characters in the novel. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, this article focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Ethan Brand” written by him in 1850 to analyze Hawthorne’s unconscious intention of creating this story and the reasons of why he writes in that way instead of another.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Early Hawthorne Forgotten

We think we know him. As Hyatt Waggoner memorably put it, he's "our Hawthorne." But do we really know him? Or his work? I think our presumed familiarity outstrips our knowledge. Perhaps we cling to an image of the Hawthorne that needs occasional revision. For several decades and increasingly in the 1990s, he was a favorite whipping boy of Americanist criticism. Biographical exposes, only faintly disguised through the legerdermain of psychoanalysis, feminist studies, and racial politics, interpreted a repeated number of Hawthorne's works not so much to illuminate the writings but the man who composed them. And so we have Hawthorne the man who lacks confidence in himself as a writer; Hawthorne who doubts his manhood; Hawthorne who harbors unacknowledged homoerotic desires; Hawthorne who reveals a lifelong attraction to and repulsion from homosexual experience initiated by a Manning uncle; Hawthorne who has an erotic fascination for Herman Melville or Maragret Fuller; and Hawthorne who, in addition to feeling dubious about the efficacy of civic reform movements generally, was a racist. Whether or not we affirm any of these views, the only "our Hawthorne" that we might agree upon is that he was a fairly dark, brooding sort of fellow, that he was rather shy or private, not given to conviviality, that he was obsessed with matters of guilt and quite severe in his moral judgments, that he inherited his gloom and solitariness and severity from the Puritan tradition of New England, and that, partly owing to all of these traits and influences, he really didn't have much regard for what he frequently termed his "idle" stories. Some evidence supports this composite image, particularly if we restrict the focus to the fiction upon which commentators have largely devoted their attention. For the most part, unrelieved darkness and pessimism seem to dominate virtually all of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical tales, as well as The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun, and considerably The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. Shy, hesitant, or self-doubting male characters appear often enough as in Tobias Pearson in "The Gentle Boy" and the title character in "Young Goodman Brown," or, more famously, in Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter. Isolation or estrangement takes center stage in "The Man of Adamant," "Wakefield," "Ethan Brand," and The Blithedale Romance. Guilt predominates in "Roger Malvin's Burial," The Scarlet Letter, Seven Gables, and The Marble Faun. Seemingly weak artist figures or nervous male characters acquire prominence in "The Artist of the Beautiful," The Scarlet Letter, and The Blithedale Romance. Accordingly, Hawthorne would not appear to have been a very happy guy. Yet we tend to forget, even those of us who read him whole, that Hawthorne wrote a lot of tales and sketches, by my count just over one hundred. Of these, only 18 can be considered more or less historical. Of the remaining 80 or so, only a few have normally been anthologized, such as "Wakefield," "Rappaccini's Daughter," and "Ethan Brand." As a result, roughly 75 works are generally unfamiliar to most readers, and I would guess that at least half of these cannot be recalled by title, let alone content, even by scholars who devote much of their professional attention to Hawthorne. For example, the following titles rarely ring a bell--"A Bell's Biography"--"My Visit to Niagara"--"The Village Uncle"--"Graves and Goblins"--"A Visit to the Clerk of the Weather"--"David Swan"--"Edward Fane's Rosebud"--"Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure"--"Chippings with a Chisel"--"Foot-prints on the Sea-shore"--"Snow-flakes"--"The Lily's Quest"--"An Antique Ring"--"The Old Apple-Dealer." Taken together, these obscure tales and sketches present a Hawthorne more diverse in temperament and authorial enterprise than we can easily perceive in the stories and the novels commonly reprinted. To be sure, some of these non-canonical works reflect the infamously known Hawthorne, but many reflect a jovial, jesting, and even child-like but certainly optimistic side of his temperament, quite unlike what we have been nudged to expect from criticism. …

EXPLAINING MENTAL ILLNESS

Like late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century doctors such as Benjamin Rush and Amariah Brigham, Nathaniel Hawthorne recognized the pathogenic potential of excessive religious zeal. In much of his short fiction Hawthorne offers a medical perspective of characters who obsessively find sin either in themselves or others. Yet he was skeptical about a new medical perspective of the human mind that potentially obscured the moral symbolism, or what he referred to as the “moral signification,” of apparent mental illness. In his short fiction Hawthorne thus tries to resolve an implicit dialogue between medical and theological views of the mind by fusing the Puritan sensitivity to symbol and moral signification with a keen medical awareness of the dangers of religious enthusiasm and unhealthy obsession with discovering moral signification. His mode of narration “saneitizes” the insane search for moral signification exemplified by characters such as Ethan Brand, Roderick Elliston, and the Minister Hooper.

The Surveillance of Woman's Body in Hawthorne's Short Stories

In many of his female-centered stories, Hawthorne shows the need to control woman’s sexuality or to insist upon her purity with a type of morality play whose sexual dynamics correspond to the theories of nineteenth-century sexuality that Foucault has set forth. As Foucault has shown in his History of Sexuality, it was not so much that sexuality was repressed in the nineteenth century, but rather that the bourgeois felt the need to control the sex (reproductive functions as well as family patterns) of the “lower” classes. Thus, there was a strange obsession and manifestation with sexuality, which was expressed in the many advice books and control mechanisms, but which ultimately had an outlet in the many varied forms of the discourse of sexuality, of which woman was often the central protagonist. Indeed, woman’s body becomes the site upon which the battle of the classes was fought. Hawthorne’s stories serve as vignettes exemplifying the compulsion to control woman’s body—as the narrators and male protagonists take on a Foucauldian surveillance. The scenarios vary but point to the same conclusion: unrestrained female sexuality (or unrestrained in the eyes of men)

The School of Hawthorne by Richard H. Brodhead (review)

Studies in American Fiction251 the non-fictional An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport (1980). Thus, one of the most admirable purposes achieved by Klinkowitz's book is that it is useful (a good Vonnegutian aim achieved by a good Vonnegut scholar). But what is more valuable in the service of these authors is that Klinkowitz's interpretations so often make one want to read or re-read many of the novels he discusses. If one has forgotten, for example, just how fine NinetyTwo in the Shade is, Klinkowitz will remind one of its power and evocativeness. Klinkowitz is working in a critical mode here that has almost no parallel in current scholarship concerning contemporary fiction. Books on the recent American novel have tended to be techmque-cum-thematic studies. That is, the techniques of the writers are tied to certain, usually epochal themes such as modernism or post-modernism, self-begetting or self-awareness, the wasteland or the garden, radical innocence or radical experience, inform or exploded form. If the metaphor of the mirror (as propounded in M. H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp) occurs in recent criticism of fiction, it is as a "silverless mirror" such as we find in Charles Caramello's excellent Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self and Postmodern American Fiction, a study that amply illustrates the tendencies noted. But there is a growing list of American critics who are, for whatever ideological reasons, concerned with realism or traditional mimesis in fiction or literature in general, including Gerald Graff, Eric Sundquist, Fredric Jameson, and a few others. By and large, however, such critics have not addressed themselves to specific contemporary American fictionists as Klinkowitz has. Thus Klinkowitz is, perhaps, once again the canary in the coal mine, testing the critical air, as he had been with Literary Disruptions. So if Klinkowitz's new book (which might have been called "The Novel of New American Manners") looks curiously like something out of the past, perhaps one should look more closely, for it may be that in it we are also seeing the future, both of our fiction and our criticism of it. Northern Illinois UniversityJames M. Mellard Brodhead, Richard H. The School of Hawthorne. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986. 254 pp. Cloth: $24.95. Richard Brodhead's The School of Hawthorne is an important contribution to American literary history. Its assessment of Hawthorne as "the only American author always to have been part of our significant past" (p. 8) is perspicacious, lucid, provocative, and timely, part of the current critical enterprise of investigating the process of canon formation as a result of cultural mediation. Brodhead offers fresh and complex readings of Hawthorne's work as it was appropriated by Melville, Howells, and James. Carefully examining each of their evolving careers, he discusses the various ways these writers assimilated Hawthorne as they defined their own vocations and wrote their own fiction. When earlier versions of two of the ten chapters appeared in print (those on Melville and on Howells), I praised them (in American Literary Scholarship 1982) as perceptive and instructive analyses of how those writers perceived and appropriated Hawthorne. The revised versions ask and answer even larger questions about these writers' changing selfconceptions in the context of America's emerging literary traditions and attitudes toward high culture. Judging canons as "changing cultural constructions," Brodhead traces the consequences of canonical status. Hawthorne provides an example of how canons are formed and changed, and of "intraliterary" transmission of influence. Brodhead is a careful reader and an astute critic who carefully builds and supports all of his arguments. His 252Reviews readings of literary texts are rich and fresh and his speculations about Hawthorne's influence are provocative. Yet occasionally I have problems with specific interpretations as well as generalizations about Hawthorne's canonization and its effects. Examining a literary relationship mediated by friendship, Brodhead treats Hawthorne as an "enabler" for Melville both as a role model ("the writer gifted to know and speak hidden truths," p. 31) and a literary model. He traces Ahab's monomania to such obsessives as Chillingworth and Ethan Brand; he believes Pierre "organizes itself around the kind of action Melville links with Hawthorne" (p. 39...

Speaking of the Unspeakable: Hawthorne's "The Birthmark"

Most criticism has accepted rather forthright and explicit allegorical interpretation of Hawthorne's Birthmark that regards mark on Georgiana Aylmer's cheek as external sign of her human, imperfect condition and understands Aylmer's attempt to remove it as expression of either scientific, rational, reformist presumption, or of too aspiring an idealism.' This reading of tale is suggested by narrator's comments and supported by similar ideas expressed in other of Hawthorne's works: Ethan Brand and Earth's Holocaust immediately suggest themselves. Other interpretations suggest with some plausibility that theme of story might be the ruthless course of nineteenth century, or relationship between maturity and immaturity, or that between Platonism and Christian authoritarianism.2 These giant steps from particular narrative to universal propositions, appended to tale like black-letter aphorisms accompanying children's fables, are encouraged, of course, by Hawthorne's narrator's solemn assurance that tale contains a deeply impressive moral. Even granting correctness of these general thematic interpretations of Birthmark, I would raise questions having to do with fictive particulars from which those generalizations are distilled-the dross left behind in leap to universal abstraction. Once certain particulars have been identified as significant ones and incorporated into a general thematic proposition, what shall be done with leftovers? They can, of course, be regarded as temporarily indigestible bones and buttons of tale, awaiting some ultimately corrosive critical formulation to dissolve into general meaning, or they can be simply dismissed as necessary mechanical adjuncts of verisimilitude having no function beyond propping up those truly significant details-like Jesus' elbows and knees-undoubtedly there, but of no particular significance. The problem with thematic approach is that most of themes extracted from Birthmark are undistinguished truisms and could have been embodied in an endless variety of alternative fictions. Hawthorne, it is conventionally argued, anticipated his story in two quite contradictory entries in The Notebooks. These suggest distance between theme and its concrete realization in story. In first entry, he wrote, person to be in possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better and ruins it entirely. For instance, a noble mansion, and in his attempts to improve it, he causes it to fall to ground. A refinement of this written two years later reads, person to be death of his beloved in trying to raise her to more than

Beatrice Rappaccini: A Victim of Male Love and Horror

RITICS HAVE BEEN FASCINATED by Nathaniel Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter, a tale which has proved as elusive, ambiguous, symbolic, intimidating as Beatrice Rappaccini is in the eyes of Giovanni Guasconti. Roy R. Male sees the story as an allegory, rich in ambiguity, about a conflict between idealistic faith and materialistic skepticism, with Beatrice symbolizing the first, Baglioni the second, Giovanni caught between the two.1 Frederick Crews emphasizes the psychosexual elements of the tale, characterizing Giovanni as another Hawthorne protagonist who regresses to juvenile nausea over female sexuality.2 Other scholars view the tale as an allegory of corrupted pure nature, or emphasize the attack on single-minded scientific inquiry, represented by Doctor Rappaccini. These interpretations have validity, especially Crews's stress on the sexual quality of Beatrice's allure. However, what I find striking is the story's concern with the relationship of three men to a woman, who, though she never deliberately harms any of them, though the men profess to have her good in mind, is nevertheless destroyed by them. tale is a partial allegory; Beatrice's poisonous nature as well as the garden its contents are to be understood symbolically, the relationship of the woman with her lover, her father, to a lesser extent her professional rival, Baglioni, are typical malefemale pairings. Yet the characters must exhibit credible attitudes, motives, responses if the story's ethical content is to have any validity. For this tale, like Scarlet Letter, The Birthmark, Ethan Brand, concerns the exploitation of one person by another, for love, for revenge, for science, or simply for curiosity. In Rappaccini's Daughter this exploitation is carried on for a

Melville's Hawthornian Bell-Tower: A Fairy-Tale Source

IN CONSTRUCTING Bell-Tower and fashioning Talus, its mechanical man, Melville evidently culled material from a variety of sources: Spenser's description of Talus in The Faerie Queene; Pierre Bayle's discussion in his Historical and Critical Dictionary of the alleged alchemy of Albertus and Agrippa; and Mary Shelley's depiction of an overreaching scientist and his man-made creature in Frankenstein: or, The Modern Promietheus. Then too, Moby-Dick itself provided a source. For the complete briefly envisions in Ahab and the Carpenter seems vitalized in the creature of Bell-Tower, just as, in many ways, Bannadonna is a partial re-creation of Ahab. But what is especially interesting-and elusive -about the literary background of Bell-Tower is the vaguely sensed presence of Hawthorne that hovers over the tale, perhaps to its detriment. A number of critics have already noted the Hawthornian nature of Bell-Tower, yet only Egbert S. Oliver has tried to explore this facet by pointing toward a particular source, Ethan Brand.1 Although Oliver is correct in attempting to identify a specific source, the similarities he cites seem somewhat forced. I find, rather, that Bell-Tower was doubly influenced by Hawthorne's Minotaur. For not only did Hawthorne's story suggest the mechanical man of Melville's tale; it also might have inspired the writing of the tale itself. Minotaur, a retelling of the Theseus story, appeared in I853 in Tanglewood Tales, Hawthorne's second collection of Greek myths re-created for children. On January I, I854, a copy of the book

The Brand Metaphor in "Ethan Brand"

T HE PRINCIPAL IDEOLOGICAL reference in Hawthorne's Ethan Brand: A Chapter from an Abortive Romance is to the unpardonable of the title-character; the principal event of the story is his suicide by leaping into a furnace. Hawthorne seems to connect the two, the sin and the suicide, in a peculiar way through the name Brand. Just before killing himself Brand feels that he has nothing further to seek; no more to achieve. 'My task is done, and well done!' he thinks. What he has done is probably stated in his soliloquy of farewell:

The Biblical Context of "Ethan Brand"

'T HAS BEEN WELL KNOWN, since Bliss Perry's early essay identifying situations and passages in Ethan Brand with notebook entries Hawthorne made during a trip to North Adams in I838, that many important source materials for the tale were drawn from direct observation of experience.' One commentator has noted that Ethan Brand is unique in the Hawthorne canon in its every character and episode being traceable to a concrete source.2 But the tale, although it contains a considerable amount of local-color material, is more than an evocation of New England setting and character.3 In effect, it is as close to romance, myth, and legend as to local color. The primary source of the romantic, mythical, and legendary elements refracted through Ethan Brand was the Bible. On the surface the chief biblical allusion is to the concept of the Unpardonable Sin, but examination of the texture of the tale reveals a complex web of additional allusions, the most significant of which are related to the story of Cain and the legendry which grew to envelope conceptions of his character. Discussion of the tale in the context of the biblical material its language and plot reflect

The Unity of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand"

The Unity of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand"

The Identity and Significance of the German Jewish Showman in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand"

The Identity and Significance of the German Jewish Showman in Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand"

Round Table: The Identity And Significance Of The German Jewish Showman In Hawthorne’S “Ethan Brand”

Round Table: The Identity And Significance Of The German Jewish Showman In Hawthorne’S “Ethan Brand”

Art and Event in "Ethan Brand"

E THAN BRAND IS unique in the Hawthorne canon in its every character and episode being traceable to a concrete source. It is unique, too, in revealing Hawthorne's developed artistic proclivities; for, although every character in the fiction existed in real life -in one way or another-Hawthorne has transformed and placed each with an economy such that the separately existing characters of life fuse perfectly into the allegorical unit of Also, apparently disparate incidents have been subsumed into an original plot dictated by Hawthorne's thematic preoccupation with the unpardonable sin. The transformation from the American Notebooks to the story is our study-one, I feel, doubly fruitful: with insight into Hawthorne's creative method and with a rendering of an exact interpretation to the tale. For this purpose, then, I will first consider Brand as a work of art; second, characters will be treated in their biographical reality and their fictional transformation; the same will then be done for incidents of particular importance; last, the organizing power of the dominant idea will be considered. We begin, then, with Brand as a work of literary art. Bartram, an obtuse, middle-aged, clown ... dull and torpid and who troubled himself with no thoughts, is the first character introduced in the story. He is tending a limekiln at the foot of Graylock. With Bartram is his son, Joe, whom Hawthorne employs as a symbol of love, and diametrically opposes to Brand. Ethan Brand, who found the unpardonable sin and is, consequently, a fiend, appears next while Bartram and Joe are con-