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Point of View in Hawthorne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph C. Pattison
Joseph C. Pattison*
Affiliation:
Sacramento State College, Sacramento, Calif
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Extract

The introductory paragraphs of “Rappaccini's Daughter” pose an issue about understanding Hawthorne's fiction which readers are expected to resolve. Hawthorne states that he attempts only slight portrayal of “outward manners” and seeks instead to create interest by “some less obvious peculiarity” of his subject. Readers must take his stories in “precisely the proper point of view,” because from other vantage points the stories “can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.” Despite Hawthorne's warning that this unnamed point of view is of primary importance in reading his fiction, critics have paid little attention to the issue. Chapter headings and indexes of major critical studies of Hawthorne make no reference to point of view, and bibliographies list almost no essays on it in the journals. In this study, a brief and tentative essay in definition, I shall maintain that the point of view essential for reading Hawthorne is one of dream. Hawthorne ordinarily invokes it as a metaphor; readers see the action as what he terms a “conscious dream” (AN, p. 125). He often establishes his metaphor through use of the semblance of actual dream early in a story and heightens its effect by employing the apparition of real dream in later moments or scenes. Only rarely, however, does Hawthorne go beyond the bounds of his characteristic metaphor and cause readers to view all the events of his story as incidents in an actual dream. Hawthorne's fictional definition of the dream point of view is exact and full, his use of it imaginative and subtle. In his own phrase, from the preface to The Snow-Image, the dream mode leads readers to the center of his fiction by revelation of the “burrowing into the depths of our common nature for the purposes of psychological romance.” Hawthorne is the artist as conscious dreamer, often of dreams that turn into nightmares and bare the tragic realities of human existence.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 5 , October 1967 , pp. 363 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

Note 1 in page 363 Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1963); LRUS, Vol. iii; PMLA, Annual Bibliographies for the past ten years.

Note 2 in page 363 Page references preceded by AN are to The American Notebooks oj Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1932).

Note 3 in page 363 See especially Werner Wolff, The Bream: Mirror of Conscience (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1952), pp. 27 fl.; Erich Fromm, The Forgotten Language (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1951), pp. 139–144; and Robert H. Fossum, “The Inviolable Circle: The Problem of Time in Hawthorne's Tales and Sketches” (unpubl. diss., Claremont Men's Coll., Claremont, Calif., 1963), p. 111. Wolff states, “With the nineteenth century came recognition of the unconscious” (p. 29), and he traces preparation for the insight back to roots in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy: “The gods send not our dreams, we make our own” (quoted, p. 27). Wolff cites, among others, playwright Friedrich Hebbel and Tolstoy, the latter for his Confession. Fromm emphasizes Goethe, Emerson (for “Demonology”), and Bergson. Fossum observes, “Romantic philosophers, expressing and creating the intellectual climate of Hawthorne's time, tended to believe that in sleep the ‘soul’ attained intuitions of the Absolute. Cf., for example, Novalis, Tieck, and Schopenhauer. This view is also central, of course, to Bergson” (p. 111, n. 5).

Note 4 in page 364 The Dream: Mirror of Conscience, pp. 299–300. Fromm, in The Forgotten Language, holds that it is not alone repugnance at the motives involved which leads us to eschew the connection between dream and waking life. He observes that the modern enlightenment engenders the notion that dreams are “plain senseless” and “unworthy of the attention of grown-up men” because they are unscientific, impractical manifestations of mind (p. 8).

Note 5 in page 365 Quoted in Mark Van Dören, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Critical Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1957), p. 119.

Note 6 in page 365 Page references preceded by EN are to The English Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Randall Stewart (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962). Stewart's preface is the most useful context in which to consult the passages, because he points out several further ramifications of the idea (although not in dream terms), including the parallels to The Ancestral Footstep and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret.

Note 7 in page 366 While discussion of these principles recurs throughout all three works, see especially Fromm, pp. 4–7, 70–72; Wolff, pp. 34–37; and Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1937), Chs. iii, iv, vi.

Note 8 in page 366 Hawthorne's plan is sound in principle but not in means of implementation. The usual method in dream or narrative is not to personify grammatical relationship but to imply it by dramatic juxtaposition. As Freud states, dream “reproduces logical connection in the form of simultaneity; in this case it behaves rather like the painter who groups together all the philosophers or poets in a picture of the School of Athens, or Parnassus” (p. 300). Or, one might add, like Hawthorne in “The Hall of Fantasy,” with its prominent display of busts of Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Milton, but including in “an obscure and shadowy niche” the bust of “our countryman, the author of Arthur Mervyn.”

Note 9 in page 366 Arlin Turner, Hawthorne as Editor (University, La.: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1941), pp. 158, 246.

Note 10 in page 366 Quoted in James T. Fields, Hawthorne (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co.,.1876), p. 29.

Note 11 in page 367 Hawthorne's care with diction is important here. Blilhedale Romance has the least passion of any of the romances and also has less than the major tales. It is in the mode of daydream, as are the sketches usually, not dream proper. Wolff notes that “dream thinking is not structurally different from waking thinking, especially as it appears in daydreams” (p. 71), but stresses that it has greater intensity than daydream (p. 70).

Note 12 in page 367 See especially Frederick C. Crews, “The Logic of Compulsion in ‘Roger Malvin's Burial’,” PMLA, lxxix (Sept. 1964), 457–465. Another recent reading, that by Fossum (see Ch. i), corroborates the position of Crews.

Note 13 in page 368 The usual night setting, illuminated by moonlight, is so patently a manifestation of Hawthorne's dream mode that it warrants no more than passing mention. Even when daylight, the setting often gives the effect of darkness, as with the house of the seven gables, the forest scenes of Hester and Dimmesdale or of Reuben Bourne, and the cave to which Richard Digby retreats.

Note 14 in page 369 Freud, p. 304.

Note 15 in page 369 See especially S. O. Lesser, “TheImage of the Father: A Reading of ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’ and ‘I Want to Know Why’,” PR, xxii (Summer 1955), 370–390.

Note 16 in page 369 Wolff, pp. 285–286.