Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T14:31:13.916Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The World as Specter: Hawthorne's Historical Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

E. Miller Budick
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay explores the significance of history in Hawthorne's fiction. Hawthornean romance, despite its extensive use of history, emphasizes its distance both from a real world and from ordinary historical discourse. The world, it seems to argue, is more like fantasy than fact, more like story than history. Nonetheless, Hawthorne's historical fictions remain carefully researched, meticulously detailed. The Hawthornean world, so highly subjective, so complexly encoded and symbolic, never dissipates into the fantasy that seems to narrate it. What prevents the evaporation of reality into dream, according to Hawthorne, what ensures the distance between the perceiving self and the world, and hence what restrains the imagination from engulfing a reality that is largely at the mercy of the individual's perceptual authority, is historical consciousness. Hawthorne's historical romances are about a historical imagination that is also a moral imagination.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 101 , Issue 2 , March 1986 , pp. 218 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abel, Darrel. “Black Glove and Pink Ribbon: Hawthorne's Metonymic Symbols.” New England Quarterly 42 (1969): 163–80.Google Scholar
Baym, Nina. The Shape of Hawthorne's Career. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Bell, Michael Davitt. The Development of American Romance: The Sacrifice of Relation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.Google Scholar
Bell, Michael Davitt. Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.Google Scholar
Bell, Millicent. Hawthorne's View of the Artist. N.p.: State U of New York P, 1962.Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self. New Haven: Yale UP, 1974.Google Scholar
Cooke, Reginald. “The Forest of Goodman Brown's Night: A Reading of ‘Young Goodman Brown.‘” New England Quarterly 43 (1970): 433–81.Google Scholar
Colacurcio, Michael J. “Visible Sanctity and Spectre Evidence: The Moral World of Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown.‘” Essex Institute Historical Collections 110 (1974): 259–99.Google Scholar
Crews, Frederick C. The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne's Psychological Themes. New York: Oxford UP, 1961.Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “History.” Essays First Series. Boston: Houghton, 1968. 1–41.Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Boston: Houghton, 1968.Google Scholar
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ed. William Charvat et al. 14 vols. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1963-80.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Daniel. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Oxford UP, 1961.Google Scholar
Leavis, Q. D. “Hawthorne as Poet.” Sewanee Review 59 (1951): 179–205.Google Scholar
Levin, David. In Defense of Historical Literature: Essays on American History, Autobiography, Drama and Fiction. New York: Hill, 1967.Google Scholar
Levin, David. “Shadows of Doubt: Specter Evidence in Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown.‘” American Literature 34 (1962): 344–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levin, Harry. The Power of Darkness: Hawthorne, Poe and Melville. London: Faber, 1958.Google Scholar
Male, Roy. Hawthorne's Tragic Vision. Austin: U of Texas P, 1957.Google Scholar
Morgan, Edmund. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1963.Google Scholar
Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.Google Scholar
Pearce, Roy Harvey. Historicism Once More: Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1962.Google Scholar
Stoehr, Taylor. “‘Young Goodman Brown’ and Hawthorne's Theory of Mimesis.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23 (1969): 393–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. New York: Holt, 1961.Google Scholar
Waggoner, Hyatt. Hawthorne: A Critical Study. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1955.Google Scholar