Tag Archives: Nathaniel Hawthorne

dreams in the ordinary world

Into the otherworld. A vision of the isolation of the human spirit in a region beyond time and beyond space… The first half of the nineteenth-century in America produced some of the most poetically evocative paintings of the century anywhere. … Continue reading

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thoreau: around the berry bush

His cabin was more like a camper in the backyard, only a mile and a half from home, and his sister brought him freshly baked cookies., but Henry David Thoreau did find a wilderness by Walden and time to develop … Continue reading

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fauning the big try

Yet, at the height of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s powers, with a sounder preparation than any American contemporary for fictional tasks still uncompleted, he wrote no fiction to speak of. Like many American writers who followed him, he had come up to … Continue reading

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the pleasure of release

Seventeenth-century ingenuity in the manipulation of water led, perhaps inevitably, to some dubious conceits. Grotesque masks spewing water from nostrils or mouth and the shameless sphinx shown here are all at the Villa d’Este. But besides grotesque masks spewing water, … Continue reading

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vulnerabilities

it is not hard to be convinced that Nathaniel Hawthorne was born to write in the manner of Dickens and Balzac. In The Blithedale Romance he did. There are gothic furbelows attached to the novel, also-spook stuff and mystifications to … Continue reading

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something sad, terrific

Nathaniel Hawthorne was ten years away from Brook Farm, the socialist, utopian project, before he wrote the book The Blithedale Romance, from his observations there. By then, the success of The Scarlet Letter had justified his habit of looking at … Continue reading

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grotesque castaway: permanent alienation

After the success of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most famous American writers. But in the twelve years following his graduation from college in 1825, he was the most invisible. He went back to his mother’s … Continue reading

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scarlet fever of moral torment

Yet for all its gloom and whisper of abominations, The Scarlet letter is among those great tales in which the spectrum of meanings runs unbroken from the clearest daylight into vibrations beyond either visions or rational interpretation. Those who wish … Continue reading

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lust in the shadows behind her: eternal remorse

D.H. Lawrence once described Nathaniel Hawthorne as the man that “knew disagreeable things in his inner soul.” But does it really matter if he gave us The Scarlet Letter? … What gives The Scarlet Letter its bite and terror is … Continue reading

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furious circumstances: reckless vaults of imagination

In the middle of 1849, during a summer of torrid heat in Salem, Massachusetts, the contending forces in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s life were drawing into battle formation, as for a civil war ling in preparation. His mother lay dying in a … Continue reading

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