A Stern, A Sad, A Darkly Meditative....

Few writers in our history have been as interested in the dynamics of the community as Nathaniel Hawthorne.  With few exceptions, his literature has almost always featured a confrontation between an individual and a community.  And so it is with our next two stories, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" and "The Maypole of Merrymount."  In future blogs I'll provide some background into those particular stories.  Here I simply want to provide some background to Hawthorne himself.

                                                                                      Nathaniel Hawthorne

Probably for many of us, our most common experience with Hawthorne has been The Scarlet Letter, and since we're often required to read it, the experience can be unpleasant.  Let's face it, in the 21st century (and 20th), novels as steeped in issues of morality and guilt, topped off with a grim Puritan setting, aren't usually going to climb to the top of a must-read list.  And in Hawthorne's works generally, there is no shortage of guilt and morality.  Consequently Hawthorne tends to be perceived as a stern, grim narrator of every weakness and failure a human being can encounter.  In short,  not a lot of chuckles in Hawthorne.  It hasn't helped that he had (as a writer) little interest in social or political issues, and in our own time his reputation as a person has suffered a hit from his comment about his contemporary women writers.  (He called them "damned female scribblers," resulting in his being tagged as a typical dead white male author.  Though he wasn't dead at the time he wrote that.)

This, of course, is an unfair reading of the man.  For one thing, if we believe that the apparent grimness and obsessiveness of his work reflect the man, then we would be wrong.  Hawthorne himself was a private, kind and gentle man, by all reports a loving husband and father, with, yes, a sense of humor, even an off-color sense of humor (that does, in fact, show up in his writing).  In other words, he wasn't anything like the moral obsessives he frequently wrote about.  Even his circle of friends, which included some of the greatest writers and thinkers in American history, were more than a bit--idiosyncratic: Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson, to name a few.  Even his choice for his wife--Sophia--showed Hawthorne's resistance to doing what he was "supposed" to do (a common theme in his literature).  Sophia was not, to use modern terminology, a catch, in the sense that she had health problems and so was something of a project.  As you can probably tell from the image, Hawthorne was also considered quite handsome, so he had many options for relationships and marriage (unlike his friend Thoreau, who was considered ghastly looking).  His own family opposed his relationship with Sophia.  But Sophia was who he wanted, and Sophia was who he married.  And his remark about women writers?  That had everything to do with Hawthorne's resentment of the popularity of the writers of sentimental romantic novels, who were making it difficult for him to make a living as a writer.  His resentment had more to do with economics than gender.

                                                                                          Sophia Hawthorne

Nonetheless, guilt, morality, communal obligations vs. individual needs, etc., are central to his work.  Much of that had to do with the changes that had occurred in our country and culture by the time Hawthorne was crafting his stories.  I'll speak about the Age of Reason and the era of the American Revolution in a later blog.  For our purposes here, it's sufficient to know that the concept of individualism that we know and revere was a product of the revolutionary movements of the 18th century.  By the time Hawthorne was writing in the early to mid 19th century, we had developed a culture within which the moral rigidity and profound community values of the Puritans, the values that anchored our beginnings, were struggling with the values of individualism that had come roaring to the front during the Age of Reason.  Romanticism--the literary term used to describe the kind of writing Hawthorne and his contemporaries were doing--has nothing to do with love or courtship.  Romanticist literature focuses on the internal feelings and thoughts of its characters, and re-defines "truth" as a function of individual perceptions.  (We'll really see this in Poe.)