Selected Tales and Sketches

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Book: Selected Tales and Sketches Read Free
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hawthorne’s sense of the project of American literature.
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    Literary maturity, we might safely suppose, is no less remarkably mysterious than any other kind: it comes, if at all, whenever it does; its forms may be structural, and therefore predictable, but hardly its causes. Yet it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the most important thing Hawthorne ever did for the maturing of his own literary career was to undertake, beginning in 1827, an exhaustive and fairly systematic study of American history in its colonial, provincial, and revolutionary periods. The early results of this program of purposive reading and imaginative “re-cognition” bear sharply on the historical density and difference of the “Provincial Tales.”
    The leading facts of “Hawthorne’s Reading” have long been clear, for the surviving records of his borrowings from his local subscription library, the Salem Athenaeum, were published in 1949. This well-thumbed list, itself but a minimum suggestion of Hawthorne’s voracious habits as a reader, clearly suggests that one of Hawthorne’s principal and vital interests swiftly became something we might almost risk calling by the name of “American Studies.” In an age when Everyman was, famously, “his own historian,” Hawthorne merely fulfilled the role more faithfully than almost anyone else. In an age when many local institutions like the Salem Athenaeum were anxiously trying to preserve and collect everything that might shed light on the prerevolutionary identity of the nation’s colonial experience, Hawthorne simply tried to read it all. Not only the obvious and crucial masterworks such as John Winthrop’s Journal and Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, which together form a magisterial frame around the original Puritan century, but more local and embattled texts as well: Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour, for example, which recapitulated the first two decades of founding under the urgent aspect of an immanent second coming; and Nathaniel Ward’s Simple Cobbler of Aggawam, whose unwonted wit meant to instruct both New and Old England men in the more timely art of political compromise that yet stopped short of toleration; and New England’s Memorial by Nathaniel Morton, the nephew and loyal redactor of William Bradford, whose own authoritative account “Of Plymouth Plantation” was piously folded into the larger “non-separatist” account of Puritan motive and meaning; and even William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians of New England.
    Nor did Hawthorne’s reading limit him to one side of the story. Willem Sewel’s History of the Quakers, which lies directly behind “The Gentle Boy,” tells much that providential and filiopietistic history found it necessary to omit or gloss over. More significantly, perhaps, Hawthorne appears to have learned the meaning of the “radical” dissent of Roger Williams and of the “populist” loyalties of John Wise directly from their own works. He even appears to have known (though perhaps at some second hand) the aboriginal Anglo-naturalism of Thomas Morton, whose New English Canaan—or whose infamous outpost at Merry Mount—has enlisted the sympathy of so many who hate Puritanism by instinct. Thus criticism as well as myth went early into the Hawthorne mix.
    Hawthorne clearly read George Bancroft’s monumental but tendentious “libertarian” account of the Puritan contribution to the History of the United States as soon as the first volumes began to appear in 1834. But just as clearly he already knew much of the material on which it was based. Most importantly, perhaps, he was intensely familiar with the authoritative but not always “friendly” account it was supposed to supplant—the endlessly patient though often dull

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