Last updated 10th July 2024: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Some of the most fruitful modern Hawthorne criticism is that which endeavors to correct and supplement the older, somewhat distorted picture of a solitary Puritan anachronism living in an “owl's nest” by recognizing Hawthorne's immediate connection with the fundamental issues of his own day. What Hawthorne owed to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries cannot be adequately evaluated in terms of “influence” or parallel passages. A more rewarding approach to the problem would be to examine part of the climate of opinion in Hawthorne's time in connection with a detailed study of his work. The present paper, intended to be suggestive rather than definitive, is an attempt to reveal some of the possibilities of this approach.
1 See Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Biography (New Haven, 1948); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 192; and Richard H. Fogle, “The World and the Artist: A Study of Hawthorne's ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’,” Tulane Stud. in Eng., i (1949), 31-52. Fogle shows that in this story Hawthorne “expounds the fundamental ethic, metaphysic, psychology, and aesthetic of English Romanticism.”
2 The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932), p. 47. 5 Hawthorne (New York, 1880), pp. 119-120.
4 The medical theory is discussed in the anonymous Die sympathetisch-magnetische Heilkunde in ihrem ganzen Umfange (Stuttgart, 1851). An interesting physiognomical treatise is Les Sympathies, ou L'Art de Juger, par les traits du Visage, des Convenances en Amour et en Amitié (Paris, 1813). A fuller background on the ethical theory will be found in my article, “Shelley and the Doctrine of Sympathy,” Univ. of Texas Stud. in Eng., xxix (1950), 183-203. Hawthorne was probably familiar with Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments since it was one of the books charged out to Mary Manning in 1827. See Marion L. Kesselring, “Hawthorne's Reading, 1828-1850,” Bull. of the N. Y. Public Library (1949), p. 18.
5 “Romanticism” in this article is defined in the terms used by Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, 1936), Ch. x, and by Morse Peckham, “Towards a Theory of Romanticism,” PMLA, lxvi (March 1951), 5-23.
6 The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (New York, 1949), p. 342. See also Bints Towards … a Theory of Life, ed. Seth B. Watson (Philadelphia, 1848), pp. 28-32. Further evidence that the discoveries in electricity were crucial in breaking down the mathematical world-view may be found in John Abernethy, Lectures on Anatomy, Surgery, and Pathology (Boston, 1828), i, vii. Historians of German Romanticism have, of course, long recognized the significance of these discoveries. See particularly Alexander Gode-von Aesch, Natural Science in German Romanticism (New York, 1941), pp. 186-203.
7 “Eureka,” in The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Chicago, 1894), ix, 34.
8 “The Birthmark,” in The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 13 vols. (Boston, 1883). All subsequent references in the text will be to this edition.
9 See Fogle, “Simplicity and Complexity in The Marble Faun,” Tulane Stud. in Eng., ii (1950), 103-120, and n. 1, above.
10 Coleridge's Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, 1930), i, 224.
11 Elizabeth R. Hosmer has shown the extent of Hawthorne's exposure to these fads in her unpublished Univ. of Illinois dissertation, “Science and Pseudo-Science in the Writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne” (1948). Hawthorne habitually treated sympathy and magnetism as synonyms. See Works, iii, 209.
12 See John W. Shroeder, “ ‘That Inward Sphere’: Notes on Hawthorne's Heart Imagery and Symbolism,” PMLA, lxv (March 1950), 106-119.
13 This is the exact converse of the situation in “The Birthmark,” where Aylmer's quest for the ideal destroys Georgiana.
14 “Hawthorne in the Looking-Glass,” Sewanee Rev., lvi (Autumn 1948), 545-563.
15 Alexander Bain, quoted in Rudolph Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1928), ii, 527.
16 Even so apparently inconsequential a piece as “Feathertop,” for instance, takes on significance in the light of the Coleridgean antithesis between mechanical and organic. “How terrible should be the thought, that the nude woman whom the modern artist patches together, bit by bit, from a dozen heterogeneous models, meaning nothing by her, shall last as long as the Venus of the Capitol!” wrote Hawthorne in The Marble Faun. It is the product of such a false Pygmalion (in this case a witch) which is dramatized in “Feather-top.” Mother Rigby has made many a “puppet” before out of “clay, wax, straw, sticks”; on this occasion she uses equally heterogeneous materials. Coleridge had stated that the truly organic form had “its true image reflected and thrown out from the concave mirror.” It is a mirror which betrays Feathertop's mechanical composition; he gazes in the full length looking-glass and beholds “the sordid patchwork of his real composition.”
17 “Eureka,” Works, ix, 39.
18 “Circles,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston, 1904), ii, 314.
19 Elsie Venner (Boston, 1861), p. 152.
20 A Mortal Antipathy (Boston, 1885), p. 148.
21 A New Philosophy of Matter (Philadelphia, 1843), p. 45.
22 O. L. Zangwill, “A Case of Paramnesia in Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Character and Personality, xiii (March-June 1945), 246-260.
23 Works, v, 19-20.
