Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Miles Coverdale to depict the process by which an individual reconstructs past experience into an emotionally and intellectually acceptable form. Through Coverdale's narrative, Hawthorne illustrates that truth is at best an approximation, that the transformational effects of time and distance obscure one's memory of remembered events, thus making absolute truth impossible to discover. As Coverdale attempts to understand his past--reordering, reassessing, and assigning it significance--a subjective interpretation of his past experience evolves. It iLs Coverdale's subjective interpretation of experience which Hawthorne presents in The Blithedale Romance; the ambiguity and mystery of Coverdale's narrativeare necessary to the design of the romance, for both elements characterize the area between truth and imagination in which experience is perceived and interpreted.

In traditional romance, the hero takes a mythical journey into the underworld where he meets and overcomes evil antagonists. Hawthorne has transferred much of that hero's role to a pivotal character whose paradoxical function is to cause the central conflict in the tale or novel while remaining almost entirely passive himself. The movement of the tale or novel depends on the pivot's humanization, that is, his return to and integration within society. Works treated are "Alice Doane's Appeal," "Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure," "Roger Malvin's Burial," "Rappaccini' s Daughter," "Lady Eleanore's Mantle," "The Minister's Black Veil," "The Antique Ring," "The Gentle Boy," Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun.

Through narrations presenting juxtaposition of conditions and ambivalence of conclusions, writers in the Hawthornian tradition compel the reader to interpret for himself the destiny of the creative protagonist. In these works the creative self is often threatened with psychical annihilation by its internal conflicts between pragmatic needs and aesthetic goals, social responsibility and professional dedication, idealistic pursuits and materialistic desires. Works in this tradition show creativity evolving from conflicting forces within the creative self. Female characters in the novels function as the creative imagination, leading the self towards creative consummation, sometimes bearing the creation itself, and always suggesting mythical figures associated with creativity. Male characters represent either the withdrawn, sensitive, idealistic ego, or the active, materialistic will. Confrontation between these internal forces produces the apocalyptic revelation enabling the self to transcend its condition by renewing contact with the creative source, the unconscious psyche. For these writers the unconscious has roots in myth, legend, dreams, and memory and is opposed to sterile conditions producing fragmentation of the creative self. In the Hawthornian tradition, the American Revolution separated the self from existence in the timeless universal givens and propelled it into assuming the determination of history. Bereft of traditional guidance and belief and burdened by moral responsibility, the creative self in this tradition is driven inward, continually seeking balance between its internal conflicts of idealism and materialism and finding the only means to immortality through the creative work itself.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1954 C3 / Master of Science

This dissertation examines the problem of narrative closure in Hawthorne's major romances in the light of the unfinished manuscripts he was working on immediately before his death. Despite the sense of formlessness the mass of material itself sugests, these manuscripts bear striking similarities to his earlier works. The problems of reading and writing, of concealment and revelation, of searching for one's origins and being shaped by one's past, the figure of the storyteller whose manner and difficulties usurp the story itself in importance--these are materials Hawthorne returned to time after time as if unable to locate precisely or exhaust completely their implications. The majority of Hawthorne's tales and romances are fragmentary. For Hawthorne, reality is always beyond man's ability to perceive except as bits and fragments. Throughout his work he asserts his awareness that man can perceive and express only a minuscule part of the immense, inexhaustible reality within and outside of his own mind. Every expression is, therefore, incomplete, and the artistic process becomes one of piecing together, by retelling and reshaping, the fragments of both imagination and perception. To study the problem of closure in narratives that have grown out of this view of the relationship between human experience and its artistic expression is to consider not only the formalistic dimension of the problem (how stories end) but the relationship between the narrative's ending and the ending of human experience in death. It is to consider the relationship between the forms of closure and the formlessness and absence of death. In viewing Hawthorne's romances retrospectively one repeatedly encounters his ironic sense that death both gives meaning to life and renders it ridiculous and that death both generates narrative and demands its ending. Hawthorne's allegory causes him to place himself within his texts in a way that makes them expressive of the design of his own life artistically woven into the texts of his career. By thus inverting the glass and reversing the cycle as suggested in "The Dolliver Romance," the reader effects the reliving of the author's life through art. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)

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For convenience and for control, the analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne's style presented here is limited to a selection of his short stories. The short story form will serve better to illustrate the thesis of this paper, that Hawthorne's style is used deliberately to create, in part, the neutral territory he desired. The shorter form has been chosen, additionally, because it requires of its author a certain discipline--superfluous elements of style must be abandoned so that the story can get on about its business. Hawthorne's short fiction, moreover, contains nearly all the stylistic techniques which he later used in his novels.

Erik Butler’s predicates for vampirism apply in some degree to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s male protagonists who skulk in the margins of “The Birthmark,” The Scarlet Letter, and “The Minister’s Black Veil.” As metaphoric vampires who seek weak prey in order to manipulate power structures, these monomaniacal parasites assume paternalistic positions in order to control and manipulate their victims, and they disguise their exploitive and egotistic sides with idealistic and altruistic passions for science and religion. This thesis explores how Hawthorne’s protagonists’ corrupt and consuming spirits echo traditional vampiristic characteristics.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Hawthorne was a moralist-fictionist, a literary artist who made effective use of a variety of moralistic techniques. The method or this study is to give careful examination both to a number of Hawthorne's tales and sketches and to the moralistic tone of his fiction as a whole. The Introduction briefly considers adverse criticism of nineteenth-century American didacticism and suggests that criticism has not given sufficient attention to moralistic analysis. In Chapter I the moralistic mise en scene in which Hawthorne produced his works is presented through the eyes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, critic of contemporary moralists and moralistic postures. Chapter II then discusses Hawthorne's fictional response to his preaching and his view of himself as moralist-fictionist. As moralist-fictionist, he may have made concessions to hie times, but it is clear that he believed that the moral sense must serve the artistic sense, and he was careful to assume a moralistic posture that would not disqualify him as a literary artist. As fictionist, he found it advisable to use techniques that could serve to defend him against the charge of ethical omniscience and personae that would dissociate him from the one-truth certainties of contemporary moralists. Chapter III then classifies those tales and sketches in whicn the moralist--the maker of the statement that is true or good or right--is not confronted by an opposing point of view. In these works the moralist makes his appearance in several forms: narrator alone, narrator aided by symbols, narrator aided by allegorical figures, fictional figure alone, fictional figure aided by narrator, narrator aided by fictional figure, and narrator and fictional figures in a moral chorus or a moral riddle. Representative tales of each moralistic point of view are analyzed and evaluated. Chapter IV then classifies those tales and sketches in which moral confrontation is operative, analyzes Hawthorne's antimoralists (the satanic pseudo-moralist, the pseudo-idealist, the comic materialist, the materialist antagonist, and the idealist immoralist), and closely examines representative tales and sketches. Much of the psychological interest in these works derives from the response of the fictional figures to the influence of the anti-moralists, and Hawthorne's technical device of ambiguity is often not a moralistic stance but a means of establishing a moralistic diste.nce between the author and his statement. The Epilogue then discusses the four major novels in terms of their moralistic structure and suggests rea.sons for Hawthorne's success in The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and his at least moralistic failure in The Blithedale Romance and The Marble Faun. The chapter also includes a general evaluation of Hawthorne as a writer who accepted the literary value of both psychological and moralistic exploration, a writer for whom the question "How should a man act?" was no less important than the question "How does a man act?" / 2031-01-01

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