I’ve recently found one of my more secret literary obsessions forced out, blinking, into the light after many years of quiet, untrumpeted adoration. At the end of last year, faced with the sudden realisation that the coming summer would mark five years since I finished my degree, I acknowledged the inevitable rot that had set into my brain and set about to search for a remedy. I found it in an open course at Edinburgh University on Victorian Gothic, whose subtitle ”Fantasies, Dreams and Nightmares in 19th Century Fiction” sent me all a quiver. Led by a most charming and wonderful tutor, David Melville Wingrove — who won me over within the first hour with the statement “Camille Paglia is who I want to be when I grow up” — our second week’s focus was to be Hawthorne’s 1851 novel “The House of the Seven Gables.” I, of course, was delighted.
Nathaniel Hawthorne is a writer I have held to be wonderful ever since I came across his short story “Young Goodman Brown” in the heady Spring of 2003, to which I date the numerous literary epiphanies that awoke the passion for literature that has gripped me intensely ever since and left me perpetually preoccupied with the notion of applying for a PhD. In the story, Salem born Hawthorne (himself descended from a judge at the infamous witch trials of 1692) returns to his town’s dark history for a romp of a story in which a paranoid man of the community is unable to shake off the possibility that his virtuous-seeming neighbours might indulge in certain dark past-times, including midnight meetings in the woods and dancing naked around devilish alters under the cover of night. Having witnessed such a meeting in the forest – why was he walking there at all, we wonder? – Goodman Brown awakens the next day to find himself alone, and his life is forever haunted by what he thinks he saw. With the witches meeting looming in his brain somewhere between reality and dream, and with no way to prove it as either, poor Goodman Brown is undone, and lives a haunted life under the shadow of what he might have seen that night.
The genius of Hawthorne’s writing in this particular story comes from this pull of reality and dream and the fact that the author does not give us, the readers, a definitive answer as to what Goodman Brown may – or may not – have witnessed that night. Read with this inherent ambiguity, the story becomes a satire of the hysteria and paranoia that proved so catastrophic in Salem, as we see a fearful Puritan mind undone by its own ideologies. Though shaking off events as having been a dream, Goodman Brown never recovers, and the final paragraph is a tour-de-force of writerly eloquence and wit that raises the hairs on my arms and a laugh from my throat each time that I read it:
“Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, waking suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long, and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom.”
I will stand up for my love of Hawthorne — and have done, publicly on occasion (mortifying, but absolutely necessary) — but I wonder that so many find his work over-long, gloomy and out-dated. (For that matter, if I could find the person who wrote on Amazon.co.uk of the Oxford Classics volume “Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories” that the “book is full of short stories, some are good but most a [sic] quite boring and you wish you could get back the time you had wasted reading them”, I would rather like to smack them with said book and then deliver a variation of my Hawthorne sermon as set forth above). And as for his work being over-long, I don’t see that many people complaining about Dickens who, by modern standards, could really have done with a rather aggressive editor.
But each to his own. For me, Hawthorne is a writer who can combine spooky spine-tingling plots with quite exquisitely lyrical description, who can wring both humour and pathos from the human heart. To anyone who has never read Hawthorne, I would suggest you to give his stories a go. For anyone who has read Hawthorne and not liked his writing, I would say that we are all entitled to our own opinions. To anyone who, like me, adores the man, I would say “Great! Now I don’t feel quite so alone. Would you like to talk about why we like him so much at great length over many cups of tea?”.
And now I stand to proclaim what I’ve so long thought and felt, but all too little said: Hawthorne isn’t just some old sop in a frock coat with a silly moustache (see below if you doubt me) but of the greats of American fiction, and I adore him.
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Genius
