Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

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Although Nathaniel Hawthorne was a serious didactic writer who was intent upon teaching a moral lesson, his tales contain many characters and episodes which are comic and intended to promote laughter. The purpose of this study was to determine the reasons, and the degree to which, Hawthorne used purely comic techniques in his writing.

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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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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