Nathanial Hawthorne

In what ways do Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories and novels resonate today? WBUR Online Arts invited scholars from around New England to send us short appreciations of Hawthorne.

"Born on the 4th of July in 1804, Nathaniel Hawthorne became the preeminent literary conscience of his nation. "The Scarlet Letter" alone -- a probing meditation on the origins and tendencies of American history and culture -- sufficed to secure Hawthorne's reputation for all time. A measured but relentless investigation of the Puritan past and its continuing presence in American life, it balances the claims of the human heart against the strictures of religious practice. Hester Prynne remains, for readers of any age, the exemplar of fortitude and love in the face of societal conformity and hypocrisy."
- Joel Porte, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell University

PHOTO TOUR OF HAWTHORNE'S HOMES AND BURIAL SITE

"Is Hawthorne relevant in the twenty-first century? No writer out of our past is more so. His recurring themes of alienation and the nature of evil speak to us now even more pertinently than they did to his own times, before Freud's revelations, two world wars, the Holocaust, and subsequent genocides instructed humanity in bleak truths that the Victorians could hardly have dreamed of. Only Hawthorne, and perhaps Melville, saw so clearly into the darker depths of human nature that the blood-drenched history of the twentieth century has forced its heirs to acknowledge. And no other writer from the past has elucidated those insights with Hawthorne's accuracy and grace."
- Philip McFarland, author of "Hawthorne in Concord"

"Philip Roth in his novel, "The Human Stain," describes Hawthorne as warning us in his fiction of America's "persecuting spirit," of our need to demonize our opponents and find scapegoats responsible for our own problems. In this era of simplistic political polarities and fundamentalisms of all kinds, Hawthorne's view of a more complex, complicated and ambiguous world, in terms of issues and ourselves, implicates us more fully in our own tragic plight. His dark, often contradictory, views of his characters and their puritanical need to brand others as black or white speaks directly to us as Americans, both historically and in contemporary times. He raises doubts where others all too easily see only simple certainties."
- Sam Coale, Professor of English, Wheaton College

"Hawthorne's great themes of religious extremism, political power, and individual conscience retain their relevance today. "The Scarlet Letter," with its critique of hypocrisy and conformity, speaks urgently to our present condition."
- Michael Gilmore, Professor of English, Brandeis University

"For over thirty-five years, Nathaniel Hawthorne interrogated his own ideas and ideals, those of his contemporaries, and those of his ancestors. Through such protagonists as Young Goodman Brown and Hester Prynne and through his letters and notebooks, he encourages us to interrogate our own hopes, fears, and assumptions, and to become more aware of our responsibilities to ourselves, to those who trust us, and to the larger world."
- Rita K. Gollin, Distinguished Professor, Emerita SUNY Geneseo

"Hawthorne continues to draw the attention of readers in the 21st century because of his prescient analysis, in both his long and his short fiction, of emerging concepts of American national identity, of the formation of the middle-class family, of shifting codes of masculinity (as modern forms of American male identity developed), and of the position of writers in republican culture and in the marketplace. His historical fiction offers a critical engagement with the pre-national American past, at the moment when many of his contemporaries were enshrining this colonial history in the service of 19th-century expansionist nation-building. These issues remain central to any understanding of U.S. culture, and our thinking about them benefits from exposure to Hawthorne's complex representations of them at a crucial period in the history of the nation."
- Brigitte Bailey, Coordinator, English Graduate Program, Associate Professor of English and American Studies, University of New Hampshire

"Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a literature in which the geography of place equals the geography of spirit. The ancients believed that places have a guardian spirit, what they called a 'genius.' Hawthorne knew this, and his ear was tuned to how places can hold the guilt for wrongs committed. He was particularly concerned with the ancestral guilt of his Puritan forebears and the injustice they inflicted while seeing themselves as paragons of the just. The mind is long haunted, Hawthorne knew and embodied in his writing, by wrongs committed and denied. Moral conscience is as natural to the human animal as hardwood forests and swampy bogs are to New England. But a person can easily be blinded to wrongs committed that are norms of the time. So Hawthorne's ancestors accused the innocent of witchcraft and slaughtered them. So Hawthorne failed in his time to embrace the necessity for the abolition of slavery. And so posterity will hold the people of our time accountable for not confronting the terrible damage being done today in the name of progress and the world economy."
- Alison Hawthorne Deming, Professor, Creative Writing, Department of English, University of Arizona

Back to Hawthorne at 200 Online Special

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