Nathaniel Hawthorne

Origins and family

Nathaniel Hawthorne was born Nathaniel Hathorne on July 4, 1804, in Salem, Massachusetts, in a house that still stands and can be visited. He was the son of a sea captain of the same name, who died of yellow fever in Dutch Suriname in 1808, when the boy was four. After his father's death, his mother moved with the children into the home of relatives, the Mannings, in Salem, where they lived for about ten years.

The paternal family had deep roots in the town. His great-great-grandfather, William Hathorne, was one of the first colonists and became a prominent figure in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, holding political and judicial posts and gaining a reputation for harsh sentences. William's son, John Hathorne, was one of the judges at the Salem witch trials and never repented of his actions. Hawthorne added a "w" to the surname in his early twenties, probably to distance himself from that lineage.

Childhood and adolescence

Illness marked his early years. In November 1813 a blow to the leg while playing bat and ball left him lame and bedridden for a year, although several physicians found no physical cause. In the summer of 1816 the family boarded with farmers and then moved into a house that his maternal uncles, Richard and Robert Manning, had built for them in Raymond, Maine, near Sebago Lake. Years later Hawthorne recalled those days fondly, in a region that was then wild, with scattered clearings and mostly primeval forest.

In 1819 he returned to Salem for school and soon complained of homesickness and of being too far from his mother and sisters. For amusement, in August and September 1820 he produced seven issues of a handwritten family newspaper, The Spectator, with essays, poems and news that show his adolescent humor. His uncle Robert insisted that he attend college, and with his financial support Hawthorne entered Bowdoin College in 1821, partly because of local family connections and partly because its tuition was relatively inexpensive. On the way there, at the stage stop in Portland, he met Franklin Pierce, and the two became close friends. At Bowdoin he also met the future poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the future congressman Jonathan Cilley and the future naval reformer Horatio Bridge. He graduated with the class of 1825.

Early writing career

His first published work was the novel Fanshawe, based on his Bowdoin years, which appeared anonymously in October 1828, financed by the author himself at a cost of 100 dollars. It received generally favorable reviews but sold poorly, and Hawthorne later tried to suppress it, feeling it did not match the standard of his later work. For years he published minor pieces in periodicals, many written in the gloom of the family home, in what he called his "owl's nest." Looking back on that time, he wrote that he had not lived, only dreamed of living.

In 1836 he edited the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. That same year he accepted a post as weigher and gauger at the Boston Custom House, at a salary of 1,500 dollars a year, which he began in January 1839. His friend Horatio Bridge offered to cover the financial risk of collecting several of his magazine stories, and in the spring of 1837 they appeared together as Twice-Told Tales, which gave him a measure of local recognition. Among them were "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Minister's Black Veil," though none drew major attention at the time.

Marriage and Brook Farm

At Bowdoin he had wagered a bottle of Madeira with Cilley that Cilley would marry before he did. By 1836 he had won the bet, but he too would not remain single. After public flirtations with Mary Silsbee and Elizabeth Peabody, he set his sights on Elizabeth's sister, the illustrator and transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. To be able to marry her, he joined the utopian transcendentalist community at Brook Farm in 1841, not because he believed in the experiment, but because it helped him save money. He paid a deposit of 1,000 dollars and was assigned the task of shoveling the mound of manure the community called "the Gold Mine." He left the same year, but the experience later inspired his novel The Blithedale Romance.

He married Sophia on July 9, 1842, in the Peabody family parlor in Boston. The couple settled in The Old Manse in Concord, Massachusetts, where they lived for three years. His neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson drew him into his social circle, but Hawthorne was almost pathologically shy and rarely spoke at gatherings. At the Old Manse he wrote most of the tales collected in Mosses from an Old Manse. Sophia had suffered from frequent migraines and long spells in bed, and her headaches seem to have eased after she met her future husband. The marriage was long and happy. He called her his "Dove," and she admired his work so deeply that she wrote of being dazzled by it and of needing to read it again to take in its wealth.

They had three children: Una, born in 1844, whose name recalled Spenser's The Faerie Queene, to the displeasure of some relatives; Julian, born in 1846; and Rose, born in 1851. After Una's birth they moved to Salem in October 1845.

Customs post, success and new homes

In April 1846 he was appointed surveyor for the district of Salem and Beverly and inspector of the revenue for the port of Salem, at an annual salary of 1,200 dollars. The post left him little time to write, as he confessed to Longfellow. Like his earlier Boston appointment, it was subject to the politics of the spoils system. Hawthorne was a Democrat and lost the job after the administration in Washington changed following the 1848 presidential election. He wrote a letter of protest to the Boston Daily Advertiser, which provoked a debate that resonated across New England. His mother's death in July 1849 deeply affected him, and he called it the darkest hour of his life.

Success came with The Scarlet Letter, published in mid-March 1850, with a preface that alludes to his years at the Custom House and to local politicians, who did not take kindly to the portrayal. It was one of the first mass-produced books in America, selling 2,500 copies within ten days and becoming a bestseller that opened the most lucrative phase of his career. Edwin Percy Whipple faulted its morbid intensity and excessive psychological detail, while D. H. Lawrence considered it a work of unmatched perfection in the American imagination.

Hawthorne and his family moved at the end of March 1850 to a small red farmhouse near Lenox, Massachusetts, in the Berkshires. There he befriended Herman Melville from August 5, 1850, when the two met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend. Melville had just read Mosses from an Old Manse and published an unsigned review titled "Hawthorne and His Mosses," in which he saw in the stories a dark side, "shrouded in blackness, ten times black." Melville was then writing Moby-Dick and in 1851 dedicated it to Hawthorne in admiration of his genius. The Berkshire years were highly productive. He wrote The House of the Seven Gables, which the poet and critic James Russell Lowell judged superior to The Scarlet Letter, and The Blithedale Romance, his only work written in the first person. In 1851 he also published A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys, a collection of myths retold, an idea he had been considering since 1846. Even so, Ellery Channing observed that the writer had suffered much in that place, and in November 1851 the family left.

The Wayside, Liverpool and Europe

In May 1852 the Hawthornes returned to Concord, and in February they bought The Hillside, a house once occupied by Amos Bronson Alcott, renaming it The Wayside. Their neighbors included Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. That same year his younger sister, Maria Louisa, drowned in the burning of the steamboat Henry Clay. Hawthorne wrote, at the request of his friend, a campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, then a presidential candidate, which portrayed him as a man of peaceful pursuits. The book omitted rumors of Pierce's drinking and presented his view of slavery as a problem that would, over time, vanish like a dream. Pierce won the election, and in 1853 he rewarded Hawthorne with the post of United States consul in Liverpool, then considered the most lucrative diplomatic position; his wife described it as second in dignity only to the embassy in London.

The family lived at Rock Ferry, on the Wirral shore of the Mersey, and Hawthorne took a steamboat each day to his office in Liverpool, as his journals show. His term ended in 1857 with the close of the Pierce administration. He toured France and Italy with his family until 1860. In Italy he grew a bushy mustache, having previously been clean-shaven. In 1860 The Marble Faun appeared, his first new book in seven years, and the family returned to The Wayside. He described himself as wrinkled with time and trouble.

Later years and death

At the outbreak of the Civil War he travelled with William D. Ticknor to Washington, where he met Abraham Lincoln and other notable figures, and he recorded his impressions in the 1862 essay "Chiefly About War Matters." His health declined and prevented him from completing further romances. He suffered stomach pain and, despite the concern of Alcott, insisted on a recuperative trip with his friend Franklin Pierce. During a tour of the White Mountains he died in his sleep on May 19, 1864, in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Pierce telegraphed Elizabeth Peabody and asked her to tell Sophia in person, since she was too distressed to arrange the funeral. Julian, then a freshman at Harvard, learned of his father's death the next day. Longfellow wrote a tribute poem, "The Bells of Lynn," published in 1866.

He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, in the area now known as Authors' Ridge. The pallbearers included Longfellow, Emerson, Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James T. Fields and Edwin Percy Whipple. Emerson felt that the event held a tragic element, in the painful solitude of the man, which he could no longer bear. Sophia and Una, first buried in England, were reinterred in June 2006 in plots beside him.

Style, themes and reception

Hawthorne began mainly as a short story writer, and on publishing Twice-Told Tales he wrote that he did not think much of them. His four major romances date from 1850 to 1860. For him a romance differed radically from a novel, since it was not concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience; he used an atmospheric medium to bring out the lights and deepen the shadows of the picture. His work belongs to romanticism and, more specifically, to dark romanticism, with tales suggesting that guilt, sin and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. Many of his stories draw on Puritan New England and combine historical romance with dense symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism. His view of the past serves to express ancestral sin, guilt and retribution, and his later writings also reflect a critical view of transcendentalism.

Critics have paid close attention to his female characters, above all Hester Prynne, whom some feminist readings regard as a protofeminist figure. The women in his novels are more fully realized than his male characters, who tend to orbit around them, and in his short stories central female figures often serve as allegorical emblems.

His writings were well received in his day. Melville regarded him as one of the new and far better generation of writers, and Poe, though distrustful of allegory and moral tales, recognized in his style a singular purity and counted him among the few indisputable geniuses the country had produced. Emerson wrote that his reputation was a very pleasing fact, and Henry James praised him for caring about deeper psychology. Evert Augustus Duyckinck judged him the most original of American writers. From the 1950s critics focused on symbolism and didacticism. Harold Bloom argued that only Henry James and William Faulkner challenged Hawthorne's claim to be the greatest American novelist, and he regarded The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun, along with several short stories, as his finest works.

Legacy

His work has continued to inspire other artists. The Mexican composer Daniel Catán wrote the opera La hija de Rappaccini (1991), based on Hawthorne's story and on a stage adaptation by Octavio Paz.