Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804–1864), novelist and short story writer.The second child of sea captain Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Manning Hathorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who inserted the “w” in his surname) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the site of the 1692 witchcraft trials over which one of his ancestors had presided as a judge. A thriving seaport in the eighteenth century, Salem was in decline during Hawthorne's youth. Hawthorne's paternal family had also declined from its seventeenth‐century prominence, and Hawthorne (whose father perished at sea when his son was four) associated his Hawthorne ancestry with a heroic yet tragically flawed American past that might be buried but was far from dead in the complacent, commercial nineteenth century of his Manning relatives.

Out of his own divided familial loyalties and historical affinities, Hawthorne forged a self‐consciously national tradition of romance fiction in such early stories as My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1832), Young Goodman Brown (1835), Alice Doane's Appeal (1835), The May‐Pole of Merry Mount (1836), and Endicott and the Red Cross (1838). In the scope of his literary ambition, and in his devotion to the craft of writing (exemplified in his often lonely twelve‐year literary apprenticeship after his 1825 graduation from Bowdoin College), Hawthorne established the prototype of the professional American writer.

The promotion of Hawthorne's fiction as representative American literature by northeastern critics and publishers helped New England retain its cultural centrality, despite the southward and westward shift of economic and political power in the Antebellum Era. The claim for Hawthorne's civic importance also enabled friends and admirers to procure government employment for him, including terms as a customhouse official in Boston (1839–1840) and Salem (1846–1849), and, during the presidency of his college classmate Franklin Pierce (1853–1857), as U.S. consul at Liverpool, England. This income helped Hawthorne support the family he and his wife Sophia Peabody had started after their 1842 marriage.

Hawthorne's novels, in their force of rhetoric, social insight, and ethical complexity, as well as in their engagement with central issues of his own day and of earlier and subsequent eras, undergird his literary reputation and cultural significance. His masterwork, The Scarlet Letter (1850), poses the competing claims of civil authority and individual freedom, and of religious and secular values, and explores the entanglements of spiritual and sexual passion, knowledge, and desire. The House of the Seven Gables (1851) explores social relations under entrepreneurial and speculative capitalism, the comforts and limitations of domesticity, and the burden of a familial (or national) inheritance founded on theft and violence. The Blithedale Romance (1852) considers the prospects and implications of social engineering, as exemplified by utopian‐socialist, feminist, and prison‐reform movements. This novel also expresses his wary attitude toward the transcendentalism of idealists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller and the utopian community at Brook Farm near Boston (1841–1847) where he was briefly a resident. Finally, the ethics of aesthetic production and consumption, the shifting relations between the United States and Europe, and the appeal and terror of the foreign (as embodied in religious, racial, sexual, and cultural “others”) for provincial Protestant Americans are among the themes of Hawthorne's Italian romance, The Marble Faun (1860). Of his literary and intellectual contemporaries, his closest affinity was probably with his younger friend and admirer Herman Melville.
See also Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras; Utopian and Communitarian Movements.

Bibliography

Sacvan Bercovitch , The Office of the Scarlet Letter, 1991.
Evan Carton , The Marble Faun: Hawthorne's Transformations, 1992.
T. Walter Herbert , Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle‐Class Family, 1993.

Evan Carton