My New Book!

My New Book!
My New Book!

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

July 24, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: Nathaniel Hawthorne

[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On how two over-taught texts can still be under-appreciated.

Unlike yesterday’s subject James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne is an author about whom I’ve written a great deal in this space, including an entire week-long series inspired by The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and this post on The Blithedale Romance (1852) among others. Yet interestingly enough, I don’t think I’ve written much about the two Hawthorne texts with which American high school students are consistently confronted (and based on what I’ve heard from those students when they arrive in college literature courses, the encounter does feel very much like a confrontation to most of them): his short story “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) and his novel The Scarlet Letter (1850). I’m not sure Hawthorne’s very 19th-century style can really speak to most 21st century teenagers, so I’m not here to disagree with their frustrations with his ubiquitous classroom presence. But at the same time, I would argue that the frustrations can lead not only our high school students but also and more importantly for this point all of the rest of us (who might well carry such classroom challenges with us into later life) to miss just how much both those texts have to offer.

Part of what makes “Young Goodman Brown” well worth our time is connected with House of the Seven Gables, as both the story and the novel offer unique and thoughtful perspectives on one of our most frustrating and telling American histories: the Salem Witch Trials. As a descendent of a Witch Trials judge, Hawthorne was particularly horrified by what had happened in late 17th century Salem, and in “Young Goodman Brown” that personal interest leads him to a nuanced engagement with how both individuals and communities can get to such extreme and destructive moments. But Hawthorne’s multi-layered story is just as interested in a profoundly universal theme, one also explored in Bruce Springsteen’s deeply personal Tunnel of Love (1987) album: whether and how we can ever really know another person, even (if not especially) the one to whom we’re married. The relationship and arc of Young Goodman Brown and his new wife Faith represents one of the most tragic yet also one of the most human depictions of marriage in all of American literature, making this a story with meanings far beyond its historical setting and subject.

The Scarlet Letter likewise features a pair of central romantic relationships, and I’d argue that both Hester Prynne’s marriage to Roger Chillingsworth and her affair with Arthur Dimmesdale are similarly thoughtful and illuminating about the dynamics, limits, and possibilities of such relationships in all of our lives. But while those two male characters take up a great deal of space in Hawthorne’s novel (and while their evolving relationship with each other is complex and crucial in its own right), at the end of the day this book is all about its female protagonist, and to my mind she’s one of the best in American literary history (both on her own terms and as a mother to the somewhat less well-developed but still fascinating character of her daughter Pearl). I don’t broadly disagree with the overarching argument of Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader (1978), her thesis that much of canonical American literature reflects at best a limited male perspective on female identity. But I think Hawthorne’s most-canonized and best novel comprises a compelling alternative to that trend.

Next CanonStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

No comments:

Post a Comment