Hawthorne's Story Research Articles

Point of View in Howells's: The Landlord at Lion's Head

THE LANDLORD AT LION S HEAD, one of William Dean Howells's lesser-known but better novels, opens with a depiction of Lion's Head Mountain that foreshadows the novelist's manipulation of point of view in his novel. In viewing the mountain, one grows aware of an ambiguous quality about it: If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit wandering and uncertain, like that of most mountain-tops; but, seen from the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion.' What one sees is apparently determined by one's point of view. lion's body, seen from the east, is only vaguely discernible; but its head is boldly sculptured against the sky in a likeness that could not be more perfect if it had been a definite intention of art. Often hidden by clouds in winter, Lion's Head in summer was a part of the landscape, as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face itself (p. 3). Howells here is almost certainly alluding to Hawthorne's story The Great Stone Face. mountain in that story comes to stand for an image of the divine. In Howells's novel the mountain is that which is given, the world as fact, standing imperatively over against us and importuning us to make something of it. What the people in Howells's novel do make of the mountain and, by analogy, of its hero, Jeff Durgin, is what Howells's novel is about. Edwin H. Cady observes: The problem of the novel is to see what it will mean that Jeff becomes the landlord at Lion's Head.2 Reading the novel as a Howellsian research into the Pligaht of

Structure and Allegory in "The Great Stone Face"

Research Article| September 01 1960 Structure and Allegory in "The Great Stone Face" James J. Lynch James J. Lynch Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1960) 15 (2): 137–146. https://doi.org/10.2307/2932451 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James J. Lynch; Structure and Allegory in "The Great Stone Face". Nineteenth-Century Fiction 1 September 1960; 15 (2): 137–146. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2932451 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentNineteenth-Century Literature Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Hawthorne's Ironic Mode

W E gather from the anthologies and textbooks that Hawthorne was a kind of anachronistic Puritan whose genius, like the fires of Milton's Hell, burned with a dark flame. It is implied, if not always asserted, that Hawthorne's stories all have the same general mood. They are sombre . . . they are serious, if not tragic ...; and if it is allowed that occasionally there is a touch of comedy or that sometimes there is a hint of satire, nevertheless it is concluded that on the whole, Hawthorne is serious.'l The assumption appears to be that since Hawthorne was serious he could not also be comic and

Hawthorne's "Alice Doane's Appeal"

US CRITICS have commented on the blundering structure of Alice Doane's Appeal: its fragmentary, ill-connected episodes; its apologetic and disproportionately long framework; its almost complete lack of dramatic immediacy.' However, an account of how this tale came to be the most poorly structured and chaotically organized of all of Hawthorne's stories has never been offered. Nor, apparently, has it disturbed anyone that this is, technically, Hawthorne's least characteristic tale-that this is the only story which is told about rather than told. The assumption is that the story represents an artistic failure. I believe, however, that if one reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the publication of the tale, an explanation other than artistic inadequacy will present itself. Alice Doane's Appeal is the only tale of The Seven Tales of My Native Land that we can be positive originally belonged to that ill-fated project,2 although certainly not in the form in which it appeared in the I835 Token.! In the introductory framework of Alice Doane's Appeal Hawthorne says of the Seven Tales:

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S REPORT OF A CASE OF PERICARDITIS CALCULOSA

To the Editor: —Recently, when I was talking with two cardiologist friends, they described some extraordinary cases of pericarditis calculosa. descriptions recalled to me Hawthorne's story Brand. My friends did not remember having read the story, nor, although they have recently been engaged in a survey of the literature on armored heart did they recall any other investigators in the field having referred to it. Their quick interest encouraged me to think that others might like to be reminded of the tale. Ethan Brand is related to have committed suicide by plunging into the burning lime kiln which in former days he had tended. Hawthorne concluded his story as follows: The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface, in the midst of the circle, snow-white, too, and thoroughly converted into lime, lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after