The mid-19th Century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne can be a difficult read because he may seem to go on for pages without much happening. He accomplishes this through linking together conditional statements and apparent asides that eventual accrue to a complex idea. By the time you reach the end of a Hawthorne story or novel, you realize that some radical transformation has occurred. Such transformations, however, are as much internal as external, entirely rearranging the individual’s relationship to him/herself and the community.
Read “Young Goodman Brown,” p. 987, “The Wives of the Dead” p. 968, and “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which can be read online here.
Hawthorne’s work, like Herman Melville’s, tends to resist the myth of American Exceptionalism precisely because it is so hard to pin him down to any one theme or point of view. By contrast, James Fenimore Cooper, another 19th Century American author, publishing a couple of decades earlier than Hawthorne, creates a fairly static character – Natty Bumppo – around whom the world transforms. (These novels include The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie.) Bumppo argues in favor of personal freedom and honesty over and against the corruptible and corrupting values of the “settlements”; he argues in favor of respect for the “red-man’s gifts,” even when his Christian values – his “white-man’s gifts” – lead him to reject practices such as scalping and holding multiple wives; and he consistently approaches his role as a hunter and a “warrior” with humility, thrift, and respect. Meanwhile, as he dearly holds these points of view, America is changing. The Indians are pushed off their land, killed, or die of sickness, and the white-man continually pushes westward, introducing his technology and his laws into a “virgin” land. In other words, Bumppo epitomizes the “exceptional” American. He is a hero.
In Hawthorne’s fiction, however, these tropes are reversed. Hawthorne’s characters are revealed as inherently flawed, and once they realize this flaw, they are transformed, even as the world around them remains relatively static. In fact, the “world” is often charged with the heavy weight of history, usually either Puritan or Italian. And in relation to this history, his characters experience some moment of awakening, realization, or initiation, after which they are left to manage the aftermath. This is certainly the case with “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Italian) and “Young Goodman Brown” (Puritan), though the issue here is not simply history, but rather the entire allegorized or symbolic world. As these characters become aware of complexity, of relativism, of nuance, they are forced to consider a new perception, a new way of looking at the world, or else they die (literally or figuratively).
“The Wives of the Dead” is a good story to start with because it introduces many of the themes that he works with. Notice, for instance, his imagery related to shadows – cast by the fire, the lamp, or the moon. The “shadow,” for Hawthorne, represents the spiritual or emotional, as opposed to the material and the intellectual. Always, the characters in his fiction who are too rational or too scientific are doomed to destroy themselves and those around them. Dreaming often plays a major role in his works, since the dream-state is located between the waking and sleeping, the rational and the spiritual. “The Wives of the Dead” also introduces us to Hawthorne’s unique complexity and his psychological themes. Are either of the wives dreaming? If one is and one isn’t, how will that change their relationship in the morning? Or maybe the two wives, married to two brothers (one a landsman and one a seaman) represent two halves of one woman’s psyche, a psyche that is split between fantasy and reality.
To understand the literature that Hawthorne was working against, it’s very useful to consider the Englishman John Bunyan’s late 17th Century work Pilgrim’s Progress. This was standard reading fair for any child of New-England during Hawthorne’s time. In the section that you will find here, (scroll down to the 4th Section, “Vanity Fair”) the characters Christian and Faithful enter Vanity-Fair, where instead of purchasing the baubles and goods of this world, they seek to purchase “truth,” which lands them before a court on charges of disturbing the peace and spreading dangerous opinions. After they are tried, Faithful is put to death, though he is then speedily taken to the celestial city, or heaven, by the agents of God. The point here, as we are discussing Hawthorne, is that these “characters” are not really characters at all, but rather symbols, representations of ideas.
For Hawthorne, however, none of these symbols will entirely suffice. He does tend toward allegory, but he usually finds that these allegorical tropes are too empty to carry the weight of human experience. In Hawthorne’s fiction, every character that appears to be absolutely bad or evil is also rendered as containing what is good or divine, and vice versa. What appears to be simply symbolic is transformed into a metaphor. In “Young Goodman Brown,” then, Brown’s “baptism” into hell is also synonymous with his coming to consciousness, his awareness of uncertainty and complexity in the world. For Hawthorne, “sin” is something very similar to inhumanity – the inability to recognize the human in the other; the inability to sympathize or empathize – which is why the sins that devil the enumerates are all sins of “selfishness.” Brown’s ultimate sin is his misanthropy, and ironically, this is brought about because he can’t understand or accept the complexity of human experience. His misanthropy is selfish.
In “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Giovanni suffers a similar fate. He is a young man out to explore the world. He finds Beatrice, whom he idealizes, and when it turns out that to love her is to embroil himself in death and loss, he is furious. He wishes to keep the ideal while rejecting the actual. She actually offers him a life outside of the decay of the city and the pride of human longing – a kind of new Eden – but he is unable to embrace this flawed yet passionate love. Moreover, each character is rendered in at least two ways, so that they are not simply allegorical but are transformed into more real representations of human beings. This is evidenced for example, in the way in which Rappaccini is rendered as both God (the creator of the garden) and Satan (the poisoner of the garden). The fact that Rappaccini is both, and that he professes love for his daughter, completely problematizes any simple reading. This story is probably Hawthorne’s most overtly sexual work. The purple-gemed plant at the middle of the garden, set in the middle of the wet fountain, clearly symbolizes the vulva, which not incidentally is also the source of the most poisonous substance in the garden. However, before one simply assumes that Hawthorne’s characters are misogynistic or out-of-touch with their own femininity, it is also important to note that Hawthorne’s female characters, including Beatrice, are almost always braver and smarter than Hawthorne’s male characters. Indeed, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” in some ways reverses the tropes of the sentimental novel and stereotypical gender roles.
Optional:
These poems demonstrate what I’m talking about when I argue that Hawthorne challenges American Exceptionalism by demonstrating that no one point of view is ever entirely correct or authoritative. In these poems, the speakers must consider the world from multiple perspectives, and each is incomplete. Perhaps by considering all of these perspectives, however, some semblance of what is “real” or “true” becomes possible.
Hoagland, Tony. “America.”
Doty, Mark. “A Display of Mackerel.“
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Facing It.”
