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Hawthorne, Bunyan, and the American Romances

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Robert Stanton
Robert Stanton*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.
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Extract

One can hardly complain that too few scholars have examined the influence of John Bunyan upon Nathaniel Hawthorne. George Parsons Lathrop's A Study of Hawthorne and F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance give excellent if brief discussions, each of which identifies several of Hawthorne's allusions to the English allegorist. The most detailed examination is W. Stacy Johnson's “Hawthorne and The Pilgrim's Progress,” in which Johnson, after establishing Hawthorne's familiarity with The Pilgrim's Progress, points out several allusions to it in the short stories and romances, discusses Bunyan's influence upon Hawthorne's allegorical techniques, and concludes that “The Pilgrim's Progress is a major source and inspiration for the art of Hawthorne.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 71 , Issue 1 , March 1956 , pp. 155 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1956

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References

1 Lathrop (Boston, 1886), pp. 30–37, 69–73; Matthiessen (New York, 1941), pp. 198–199, 273; Johnson, JEGP, l (1951), 166.

2 “Hawthorne and The Faerie Queene,” PQ, xii (1933), 197.

3 Quoted by Manning Hawthorne, “Aunt Ebe: Some Letters of Elizabeth M. Hawthorne,” NEQ, xx (1947), 214.

4 Frederic I. Carpenter, “Puritans Preferred Blondes: The Heroines of Melville and Hawthorne,” NEQ, ix (1936), 253–272; Philip Rahv, “The Dark Lady of Salem,” Image and Idea (Norfolk, 1949), pp. 22–41; Randall Stewart, ed. The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (New Haven, 1932), pp. xliv–lxxxix, and Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (New Haven, 1948), pp. 242–265.

5 All quotations from Hawthorne's works are from the Riverside Edition, ed. G. P. Lathrop (Boston, 1883).

6 The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. J. B. Wharey (Oxford, 1928), p. 41.

7 There are several interesting variants of this comparison elsewhere: Holgrave says that the Past “lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body”; the children run from the house after the Judge's death “as if some giant or ogre were in pursuit”; Hawthorne speaks of the Judge's “ogre-like appetite” (pp. 219, 350, 325).

8 Twice-Told Tales, p. 479.

9 See above, n. 6.

10 Nathaniel Hawthorne, pp. 245–246.

11 Mosses From an Old Manse, p. 218.

12 Nathaniel Hawthorne, p. 255.