The recent publication of the bulk of Hawthorne's letters has precipitated this study, which deals with Hawthorne's creative and subversive narration and his synchronic appeal to a variety of readers possessing different tastes. The author initially investigates Hawthorne's religion and demonstrate how he disguised his personal religious convictions, ambiguously using the intellectual categories of Calvinism, Unitarianism, and spiritualism to promote his own humanistic "religion." Hawthorne's appropriation of the jeremiad further illustrates his emphasis on religion and narration. Although his religion remained humanistic, he readily used the old Puritan political sermon to describe and defend his own financial hardships. That jeremiad outlook has significant implications for his art.

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.)

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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The literary and socio-political environments of early nineteenth-century America demanded from Hawthorne a new formulation of the allegorical mode, which in turn afforded him means to critique that same historical situation. His metonymic and realistic uses of allegorical techniques invert the emphasis of traditional allegory, permitting him subversively to critique the idealist principles of contemporary historiography and the Transcendentalist movement. Hawthorne's discontent with antebellum historiography's conflation of the Puritan colonists and the Revolutionary fathers, and with Transcendentalism's disregard for the darker side of human nature, led him to critique these idealisms in his fictions. His appropriation of allegorical conventions allowed him to enact this critique subversively, without alienating the increasingly nationalistic American reading public. This subversive program exerts a global influence on Hawthorne's work. The first chapter of this thesis defines my use of the term "allegory." The second situates Hawthorne within the allegorical tradition, the third within the American ideological context. The last two chapters identify and discuss Hawthorne's appropriations of the allegorical conventions of personification and procession as they are found in each of the three forms in which he most commonly wrote: the sketch, the tale, and the historical romance.

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The major works of Nathaniel Hawthorne include a number of recurring references which appear to be linked with one another. There is mention of electric rings, glavanism, sympathies between people, somnambulism, gold chains and amulets, mesmerism, and much more. Some of the characters Hawthorne created have a strange power or control over others. There are numerous references to mediums and trances. In addition one finds a recurring theme in Hawthorne's major works--man's search for universal order and harmony. A close examination of these related elements shows them to have a common denominator in mesmerism.A review of American culture and thought prevelant during the first half of the nineteenth century reveals a people nearly obsessed with the idea of mesmerism. That obsession is'-reflected in four little-know tales written by one of Hawthorne's contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe. In these tales--"A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, "Mesmeric Revelation," "Some Words with a Mummy," and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"-- Poe's focus is directly on the various aspects and variations of mesmerism. These four tales by Poe provide ample evidence that mesmerism and the various ideas and concepts associated with it were well known to Americans of the mid 1800's. It is reasonable to assume, then, that Nathaniel Hawthorne also had some knowledge of mesmerism. An examination of his works, in fact, clearly supports that assumption. Hawthorne, however, unlike Poe, did not deal directly with the subject of mesmerism. In his writings Hawthorne made practical use of the trappings and tenets of mesmerism. In the artistry of at least four of his works--The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Rommance, and The Marble Faun--Hawthorne appears to have utilized mesmeric ideas and concepts in a supportive role.In this paper the previously mentioned literary works by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne will be closely examined. The critical analysis of these works presented here is different from other analyses of the same works by Poe and Hawthorne in that it concentrates on the element of mesmerism. Poe, a popular writer of his day, dealt directly with the subject of mesmerism, and his works provide evidence of the knowledge the American people had of mesmerism by the 1840's. The central focus of the paper will be to prove that Hawthorne, unlike Poe, made use of the various tenets and trappings of mesmerism to delineate character and to develop plot.Though an extremely complex philosophy, in brief, mesmerism deals with the relationship between man and his universe as well as between man and his fellow man. A detailed discussion of the origin and development of mesmerism is presented in chapters two, three and four. As a philosophy, mesmerism is based on the idea presented by Franz Anton Mesmer in his doctoral dissertation: the entire universe is connected by a force consisting of tiny particles or an electrically charged fluid which emanates from the planets. Mesmer named this force gravitas universalis. The ebb and flow of this universal force is what relates all elements in the universe, including man, to one another. When one is in harmony with this universal fluid, peace and health prevail. If one is not in harmony with the forces of the universe, however, physical or mental illness follows.This basic philosophy of mesmerism is in many ways identical to Nathaniel Hawthorne's conception of sin as it relates to the good and virtuous life. Hawthorne believed that to be at peace, man must establish a true and meaningful relationship with some other person. Such a relationship was prevented by sin, and the worst sin was to seek the lack of love in others or to disallow love to enter one's own heart. Sin for Hawthorne, then, indicated that man was out of tune with the forces of the universe. Hawthorne combined his concept of sin with the philosophy of mesmerism to form the basis for a writing device. The analysis of Hawthorne's works reveals elements of mesmerism intricately woven into the fabric of his writing, leaving little doubt that Hawthorne made deliberate use of mesmerism to delineate character and to develop plot.

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