Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

by Svetlana Antropova

Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American novelist was born on July 4th of 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts in a puritan family of Nathaniel Hathorne and Elizabeth Clarke Manning. Later in his life Hawthorne added letter “w” to his last name. Some say this was because he wanted to disassociate himself from his ancestors: William Hathorne, a magistrate of the highest court, who ordered Quakers whipped on the streets of Salem and his son John Hathorne, who was the only judge that refused to repent for his participation at the Salem witch trial.

When Nathaniel was four years old his father, a sea captain, died of yellow fever while he was in
Surinam. For the next eight years the young Nathaniel Hawthorne, his mother and two sisters, Elizabeth and Maria Luisa, lived with their relatives in Salem, until in 1816 when Nathaniel’s uncles decide to build them a house. The new house was located in Raymond, Maine, on 12,000 acres of the forest on the shores of Sebago Lake. Hawthorne remembered these time as the happiest years in his life. Here his imagination was constantly stimulated by the beautiful scenery and the simple unsophisticated people, the woodsmen and the farmers, who lived nearby. Even the strange leg ailment that he was suffering from in Salem (he was hit on the leg playing “bat and ball” at the age of nine) completely disappeared and never returned again. Hawthorne’s sister Elizabeth always felt that in Maine her brother was born as a writer.

Hawthorne’s careless life in the countryside came to an end when his uncle Robert decided that the time had come to send his young nephew to college. Nathaniel protested but in 1820 he entered the Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. On his way to college, Hawthorne met a young men, Franklin Pierce, who will become the 14th president of the United States. Despite the differences in their personalities the boys became close friends. Franklin Pierce and another Bowdoin’s fellow student, a future naval reformer, Horatio Bridge, will later play a significant role in Hawthorne’s life.

During his first year at Bowdoin Hawthorne struggled with money. His uncle Robert, for some unknown reason, left his nephew in college without any funds and Nathaniel had to constantly borrow money from wealthy students. Hawthorne finally received enough money from home to pay his debts but the fact that he was forced to borrow left him feeling humiliated, inadequate and added mental suffering to his extremely sensitive nature.

It is unclear what and how much Hawthorne wrote while studying at Bowdoin. However his sister Elizabeth remembered that in one of his letters home he said: “made good progress on my novel”. Supposedly he was talking about “Fanshawe: A Tale”, a novel about college life, that Hawthorne published anonymously in October of 1828 using his own money. “Fanshawe” received some positive reviews. A writer and influential editor Sarah Josepha Hale advised potential readers to purchase the novel assuring them that “it is worth placing in your library”; and an American journalist, poet and fiction writer William Legget wrote that: “The mind that produced this little, interesting volume, is capable of making great and rich additions to our native literature”. However, the book didn’t sell well, and Hawthorne believing that he produced mediocre work attempted to destroy all the copies. The novel became extremely rare and Hawthorne was so secretive about it that even his wife Sophia didn’t know that her husband had written it. During his years at Bowdoin Hawthorne apparently also wrote a collection of short stories “Seven Tales of My Native Land”, which he also burned when the publisher would notagree to print it right away.

After graduation Hawthorne returned to his family home, where he spent the next twelve years. This was a period of isolation and solitude that he remembered as a strange, dark dream. During this time Hawthorne found his voice and a unique style as a writer, and self-published several stories, including “The Hollow of the Three Hills” and “An Old Woman’s Tale”. By 1832 he wrote “My Kingsman, Major Molineux” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial” which are considered to be his greatest tales, and by 1837 with a help of his friend form Bowdoin Horacio Bridge he published a collection of short stories “Twice-Told Tales”. “Still it was your prognostic of your friend’s destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction”, wrote Hawthorne in the preface.

Finally Hawthorne’s writing brought him some notoriety but not a dependable income and he had to get a job at the Boston Custom House. Throughout his life, Hawthorne will be known to be impractical with money. In his later age he made his publishers his bankers and had only the slightest idea of how much royalties they owed him. His experience at The Boston Custom House however became handy when Hawthorne was publishing one of his most famous novels: The Scarlet Letter. Published in 1850, “The Scarlet Letter: a Romance” is considered to be Hawthorne’s best work and explores themes of shame and sin in puritan society. A single mother is forced to wear letter “A” that stands for “adulteress” on her clothes as a punishment for conceiving a child out of wedlock. In the introductory essay called The Custom House, Hawthorne responded to his political enemies. The essay was surrounded by controversy which contributed to the publicity of his book. The novel was criticized by the religious leaders for the subject matter, but many critics praised the book. Henry James once called The Scarlett Letter “beautiful, admirable”, and “extraordinary”.

Around 1841 Hawthorne met his future wife, transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. While seeking a possible home for himself and Sophia he ended up joining the transcendentalist’s utopian community in Brook Farm where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Hawthorne was not particularly interested in transcendentalism but living in Brook Farm was cheap and it allowed him to safe money to marry Sophia. Hawthorne’s experience at the Brook Farm would provide an inspiration for his novel The Blithedale Romance. The novel was published in 1852 and depicted the life of a fictional utopian community of Blithedale Farm where Hawthorne’s characters came to live in order to escape from the industrial revolution and the morally deteriorating society. Hawthorne based his characters on real people: his heroine Zenobia resembles a renowned feminist Margaret Fuller; Hollingsworth was modeled on Horace Mann and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the narrator Miles Coverdale was the alter-ego of Hawthorne himself. The novel was criticized for both: being too realistic and for promoting the principals of transcendentalism, even though Hawthorne exposed contradictions and hypocrisies of the seemingly idealistic transcendental environment.

In 1852 Franklin Pierce became the president of the United States and appointed Hawthorne to the post of an American Consul at Liverpool, England, which allowed Hawthorne to save $30,000 and to retire after four years. In return Hawthorne wrote Pierce’s campaign biography. These English years inspired a book of essays called “Our Old Home” published in 1863. In 1857 Hawthorne retired from his post and went to Italy along with his wife and children. After Italy they came back to England and then, in 1860 returned back to the United States. Here, in the United States, Hawthorne finished his longest novel, “The Marble Faun”.

Nathaniel Hawthorne died on May 19, 1864 supposedly from stomach cancer. He died in his sleep while on a tour of the White Mountains with his lifelong friend Franklin Pierce. Throughout his life Hawthorne also remained friends with another fellow student from Bowdoin, a poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Longfellow served as a pallbearer at Hawthorne’s funeral and wrote a poem “The Bells of Lynn” in his honor.

Essay Questions

1. Do you think Hawthorne’s connections in the political world contributed to his success as
a writer?
2. Do you think transcendental communities have a future in our society?
3. What do you think is a true symbolic meaning of Zenobia’s flower?

Sources

Encyclopedia of World Biography. Nathaniel Hawthorne Biography. Advameg, Inc. 2018.
https://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Hawthorne-Nathaniel.html#ixzz5Z9lMWKv3
Starkey, Marion, The Devil in Massachusetts, Knopf, Doubleday, 1969.
Wikipedia. Nathaniel Hawthorne. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne

Geni.com. Nathaniel Hawthorne. https://www.geni.com/people/Nathaniel-Hawthorne-
Jr/6000000001354952389

Hawthorne Association. Nathaniel Hawthorne in Maine.
http://www.hawthorneassoc.com/html/downeast_mag.html
Wikipedia. Fanshawe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanshawe_(novel)#cite_note-2
Mellow, James R. Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,
1980: 43. ISBN 0-395-27602-0

Text included with the permission of the author.

Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne: By Mathew Benjamin Brady – Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11558996