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Any serious study of Hawthorne
traditionally begins with The Scarlet Letter; so, why are we looking
at the short stories?
I have chosen the short stories
because they allow us to engage with a broader range of Hawthorne's
aesthetic and cultural preoccupations over a longer time frame
(the stories range from the 1830's to1850) than The Scarlet
Letter would have permitted. This decision reflects the course's
interest in questions of American identity and aesthetics and
my desire to trace the trajectory of some key ideas about nation,
culture, and art in the history of our nation's literature.
As Colacurcio notes in his excellent
introduction to the tales, a few things about Hawthorne deserve
particular thought as you discuss his short fiction.
- His interest in colonial
and revolutionary era history. Hawthorne wrote fiction
just as the notion of a uniquely American identity and cultural
legacy was emerging as a prominent ideal in American literary
circles. In many ways we can read Hawthorne as an exemplar
of this interest in the history of a young nation, but we
should also note the way that Hawthorne questions the already
emerging ideology of America in his historical stories.
- Hawthorne reads history
to comment on his contemporary situation. Beware of falling
into the trap of thinking of Hawthorne as a man lost in his
past. His stories raise the question that Colacurcio so aptly
summarizes: What does it "mean to retell the stories
(if not quite the events) of the Puritan and Revolutionary
past in the midst of a bourgeois, undemocratic, and somewhat
bumptious present." Consider some of the contexts of
Hawthorne's early writing: Jacksonian democracy (Hawthorne
himself lived off of the patronage of a political machine),
an expanding and industrializing economy, the on-going extermination
and dislocation of American Indians, the continued tensions
generated by Slavery, and the emergence of transcendentalism
in American culture. As the stories you are reading demonstrate,
Hawthorne engaged with each of these issues through his fiction
- The crucial importance of
understanding the self in its social context. Ultimately
Hawthorne was a historicist in terms of his both his literary
and philosophical values. Many of his tales tell the story
of men (in particular) who suffer themselves and destroy others
by searching for a self apart from a broader community. This
notion of the pre-eminence of the self and its transcendence
over nature and culture (which contemporary critics would
read as an oversimplified view of transcendentalism) deeply
disturbed Hawthorne and inspired much of his short fiction.
- Hawthorne often creates
moral tension in fiction by structuring contradictions between
the characters' actions and their words. Clues for resolving
these contradictions usually come from the symbols and images
employed as the context for these words and deeds. Frequently
the last lines or words of the story do not point the way
toward the moral or ethical perspective the story endorses.
Or--for those of you who are uncomfortable with the idea that
we can determine which perspective a text endorses--often
the story's conclusion sets forth a perspective at odds with
the broader structure and direction of the story. (By the
way, you will not find this fourth point in Colacurcio's intro;
you have only me to blame for this idea.)
If you keep these four points
in mind as you read the tales, you should arrive to class with
plenty to discuss.
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